Designing and implementing a research project was challenging due to the limitations. There are many things that I find interesting and would love to research and explore more, however, they require tools and equipment that I do not have access to. I also found it challenging to plan all aspects of the project ahead of time. Once I was writing my final report I thought of many things that I would change to improve the quality of my data. I think having multiple sites would be beneficial to increase the confidence in the findings and make them more applicable/transferable. To do this though I would have had to reduce the amount of replicates, which would decrease the quality of the data and decrease the confidence in the results. Finding a balance between having multiple sites but enough replicates is very tricky without massively expanding the scope of the project.
Additionally, I found it challenging to find other studies that reported similar findings since many of the published research investigated very complex topics with many variables considered. It was difficult to find patterns in the data that were only related to the tree stem diameter and elevation, since most studies that included those variables were also looking at temperature, humidity, soil, water, and many other factors. I also discovered that there are better methods (such as dendrochronology) to study the growth of trees. So this limited my results.
Overall, I think I did well considering I had not physical resources/tools to help. I did gain a much bigger respect for researchers in ecology. The complexity that goes into designing and implementing ecological research is very intimidating and challenging.