Developing the tables and graphs helped me understand how salinity affects the population of the vegetation and trees. The major challenge when developing the graphs was selecting the graph that would show the impact of salinity on the population of the plants. At first, I thought of selecting a line graph that would show the four locations of each plant in the four different sampling nations. However, the use of a line graph was too complex as I would have needed five different graphs to impact salinity on the five different species of trees. However, the use of a bar graph provides a better alternative, as I would show each species and its population in the four sampling locations. This would help show the trend across the four sampling locations more so with respect to distance from the sea. The second challenge was dealing with outliers. In some sections, I got some outliers when drawing the graphs. This caused a massive challenge with the scale. As a result, I had to redo a recount of the tree sample in two sampling locations to avoid the problem of outliers. After dealing with outliers, the graph had the right scale, and the population of the trees and vegetation was well represented. In the future, I will make sure that there are no cases of outliers before I start developing the graphs. Additionally, it’s important for a researcher to understand the type of data one has before developing the graphs. Through this, graphing will be easier and more suitable for the data at hand.
Outliers can be important data points and should not be removed unless there is a good reason, like you know for sure there was a measurement error.