Date and Time: April 4th, 2024, 4:00 PM (Winnipeg, Canada)
Weather Conditions: The sun shines brightly over Winnipeg, with temperatures hovering around 14°C and a gentle breeze blowing from the northwest.
Introduction: Today, with bright sunlight and ideal weather conditions, I decided to venture into the field.
Sampling Design: I combined systematic and stratified sampling techniques to ensure thorough coverage of my study areas. At three distinct locations—Swimming Pool Fence Lining, Suburban Neighborhood, and Distant Urban Forest—I systematically selected Blue Spruce trees at intervals of every 3 trees. These locations served as strata, allowing us to capture variability across different environmental conditions. Each location yielded 5 replicates, providing a sufficient dataset for analysis. Despite encountering challenges in accessing certain areas within the urban forest due to the sheer density of foliage and maintaining consistency across observations due to blue spruce trees not being uniformly placed or distributed in these remote regions in contrast to the areas near my building. For the majority, as I traversed the landscapes, I noticed a particular pattern or trend of healthier looking bruce spruce trees with brightly colored needles in the forest area but even then there were a few blue Spruce trees in the forest area that exhibited lower needle discoloration severity in comparison to the samples near the swimming pool and neighborhood area.This observation prompted reflection on my hypothesis regarding the severity of the impact of human activity and pollution on Blue Spruce health and got me to consider several factors that could be potentially influencing this discoloration being observed in blue spruce trees perhaps due to fungal, bacterial and insect infestation related diseases or harsh weather changes serving as another factor.