I created a table which included Shannon’s diversity index, species density (measured as plants per square foot), and frequency (as a percentage) for both the overstory and shrubstory. The challenges I ran into included organizing the data in an efficient way. It took many different tables and calculations to collect different number for these data points. Such as aggregating the species information for different tree sizes, ensuring the data was properly grouped by small, medium, and large bur oak trees, to chose how these would be grouped I used a bell curve. Summarizing into a single table was another hurdle, I tried to make it clear so readers could easily interpret the species composition trends while understanding the significance of each metric being diversity, density, and frequency. After a few tries the data began to reveal some interesting patterns.
I antisapated to see a higher diversity in the shrubstory than in the overstory, and this was confirmed in my data. I thought the smaller trees had the most diverse shrub layers, but the medium sized trees acuaally had a slightly higher Shannon index indicating higher diversity where as for the overstory the smaller trees had the highest Sharron Index. On the other hand, large bur oak trees had a more dominant overstory, this decrease in diversity in larger tree areas was as expected, as mature oaks tend to use up resources, limiting the growth of other overstory species. These findings open up a range of new questions , such as how environmental factors such as soil nutrients, moisture levels, and herbivory pressure might affect the shrubstory’s density. Or if conducting a seasonal comparison could reveal changes in diversity and density over time.