My graph was a simple line diagram showing the average number of flowers counted per quadrat vs the amount of direct sun exposure experienced by the shrubs. My data followed the expectation that the number of flowers increased as the amount of direct sunlight increased.
What was interesting to me was the difference in spread of the counts for each group (hours of direct sun exposure). For shrubs with low direct sun exposure, the data was clustered with a range of 5; whereas a high degree of sun exposure had a range up to 42. With such a big spread in some of the data, I was very curious if the statistics would be significant or not.
Plotting the data was pretty simple, but I enjoyed the challenge of doing the statistics. I haven’t had any opportunity in the past to analyze my own data so this was a new experience. I was really happy when I determined that my data was statistically significant (p<0.1) and I could apply my standard error calculations to the graph with proper error bars.
If I were to do this again, I would do it at the beginning of summer (vs fall) when I have longer sun exposure so I could get data beyond 7 hrs of direct sun. I would like to see at what point the number of flowers per quadrat plateaus or if it possibly goes down with too much sun.