The only difficulty I had was in determining what graph would suit my study best, I had at first thought of a bar graph to examine if there was consistency across the sites, but realized I have too many variables for anything to be strongly determined UNLESS I compared one variable to the presence of wildlife, singularly. This led to some messy-looking graphs until I realized I needed to utilize a scatterplot graph, across three variables, that turned out ineffectively! Lastly, I decided a line graph might show me the desirable outcome. All three graphs were trialled maybe 15 times each, using R software as I am the most knowledgeable about this software. I ended up creating 4 line graphs, to illustrate each variable; vegetation density, human presence, temperature, and wildlife, and it generated these graphs: here
The results were really interesting, human presence was the most variable of the graphs, which I think really reflects our impact, as although the temperature was steadily skewed to the right, human variation remained high, and honestly wild in all of the 6 spots.
Overall, the actual inputting of data wasn’t complicated but selecting the type of graph, and then inputting the data I had obtained, made it much more difficult. Again, I ended up viewing trends that indicate human impact and climate change moreso than if wildlife was attracted to the Sweet Chestnut tree, which overall disputed my hypothesis entirely. I had hypothesized that the presence of wildlife around the sweet chestnut tree was influenced by variations in vegetation amount, human presence, and temperature. I predicted that If vegetation amount, human presence, and temperature affect wildlife presence, then there would be a positive correlation between these factors and the rating of wildlife presence, with higher ratings associated with greater vegetation amount, lower human presence, and moderate temperature. This will have to rejected, due the fact that I incorporated too many active variables, on too small of a sample size to really reflect the hypothesis. Overall, this project made me really reflect on how details matter, and in the finite details is where the truth lies, and that I made an entire project that was intended for a specific purpose become general and not really provide incredibly insightful data. Alongside the graphs I made a table: here
This was super insightful to see in a graph form because the hecticness really instilled in me that I chose too many variables to observe and should have kept the design simpler.