The activities of deer are quite interesting to me so, I decided to study them. I chose the river bank, the area surrounding the field, and inside the field to research deer’s activity. I saw some deer footprints and deer scat in the field but I have never seen deer in the field and I usually go to the field between 8:30 AM and 4:30 PM. I have seen deer multiple times at the bank of the river during the day and seen deer in the outside area of the field in the morning. I think in the day time there is more human activity in the field so deer stay away from the field. but past five to early dawn there is barely any human present in the area, so deer come to the field for food and they just off the fence inside and out of the field.
Hypotheses: Deers are present there because of crops (food) and river (water) but their activity is minimalist during the day due to human presence.
For my hypotheses, the potential response variable is deer activity and the potential explanatory variable is human presence and crop damage
For your hypothesis, you won’t be able to say why deer are present only if they are or are not and then you can discuss why that might be.
It sounds like you have a gradient from the field down to the river and so why not look at deer presence in the field vs. riverbank? Then you are generally comparing habitat types and they might vary in food availability but they also vary in the cover / security they provide to deer and you could base your hypothesis on these ideas.
It is hard to measure deer by their presence without spending a lot of time and your presence could impact the presence of deer. Your sample size will likely be quite low. It would be better to measure deer scat as noted below.
A good way to study deer is to measure deer scat. It is fairly easy to recognize compared to other ungulates and smaller mammals. You can do transects from the field into the river bank and then either randomly or systematically place quadrats (say 5 m squared / circle) and measure the number of individual scat piles in your quadrat. You will want to ensure in some way that you do the same number of samples in the field and riverbank.
If you keep it the way you have it, how will you sample? I don’t understand how crop damage is a predictor variable based on your hypothesis. I’m not sure you can tell deer browse very easy based on other damage to crops from other sources (environmental or other animals).
Also, you haven’t described how human presence changes across your gradient. What is human use like in the different habitat types?