Did you have any difficulties in implementing your sampling strategy? If yes, what were these difficulties?
I initially didn’t plan on recording data about pollinators on my selected plant species at all, instead, planned on just recording growth rates of the plant species. Although, during my initial observations of the study area, I couldn’t help but notice the amount of pollinators visiting my sample unit species and thought that might be a better research topic instead. After that decision, I didn’t have many difficulties implementing my sampling strategy, although, since I was recording pollinators on my selected plant species, it was sometimes difficult to tell if the pollinator visiting was the same one as a previous visit or not, so, to offset this, I would just count it by ‘visits’ instead of individual pollinators. But, my sampling strategy of systematic sampling was straightforward, I measured the total length of the transect then divided that by 5 for my 5 replicates and marked my quadrats from those figures.
Was the data that you collected surprising in any way?
Yes, it was surprising, because I had expected that since one of my selected plants species tends to grow in clumps, that they would have the highest number of pollinator visits, determined by sheer density, but so far, it was actually the second species that grows more individually and few and far between.
Do you plan to continue to collect data using the same technique, or do you need to modify your approach?
Yes, I plan to continue to collect data using the same technique.