Effects of Human Trash on Invertebrate's Abundance, Diversity, and Density in Woodlot

For this field experiment, all data were collected in York University's Keele campus' Danby woodlot on Tuesday October 14, 2014 at around 2:30PM to 4:00PM in the afternoon. The weather forecast for that time of the day was cloudy (cloud cover of 100%) with a high of 22 degrees Celsius and a high chance of rain; wind speed at 10km/h South and a humidity of 72% (according to http://www.timeanddate.com/weather/canada/toronto/historic). During the duration of the data collection, very light precipitation was observed in the woodlot. This field experiment was led and supervised by Taylor Noble with the data collection for the woodlot conducted by Jason and Leron. We utilized a 1m x 1m quadrat to take our 30 randomly selected different samples. 15 quadrat samples were taken in the areas that were affected by human trash and 15 quadrat samples in the areas that were not affected. The basis for this was that we considered an area to be affected with human trash if it had a trash coverage of more than 20%. Only one person was assigned to do this estimation, which was Leron, to give us a better consistency in the estimation. We did not consider broken tree branches and dead leaves as trash, only human induced items were accounted for (objects that are not usually found in that woodlot environment). On the other hand, if the area studied had less than 20% human trash coverage, that sample was considered to be not affected. We recorded the number of invertebrates, the number of different types or invertebrates that we observed in each quadrat sample and their names. For this experiment, anything inside the quadrat as well as on top of the quadrat equipment were accounted for. We used gloves to gently remove the leaves and trash in the sample area. We also inspected for any invertebrates that were stuck on these leaves and trash and included them in our count. For invertebrates with high abundance, like the ants mostly, we divided the quadrat into 4 sections and we just counted one of the sections and estimated the abundance by multiplying by 4. We did not include any dead invertebrates in our data however. We only counted all the invertebrates that were visible on the surface after the removal of the trash and leaves and or broken branches. We did not dig into the soil to study what invertebrates were inside. The composition of the human trash was also recorded. We tried to generalize most of the trash into a single item that they belonged to unless of course there was only one of that item then we specifically indicated what it was. For example, candy wrappers included Halls wrapper, lickerish wrapper, Mars wrapper, Oh Henry wrapper, etc. So anything that was considered a candy/chocolate treat was listed as a candy wrapper.

本次野外实验的全部数据采集工作于2014年10月14日星期二下午2:30至4:00左右，在约克大学（York University）基尔校区（Keele campus）的丹比林地（Danby woodlot）内完成。当日该时段的天气预报为全天多云（云量100%），最高气温22摄氏度，降雨概率较高；风速为10km/h，风向南，相对湿度72%（数据来源：http://www.timeanddate.com/weather/canada/toronto/historic）。数据采集期间，林地内观测到微量降水。本次野外实验由泰勒·诺布尔（Taylor Noble）牵头并监督，林地数据采集工作由杰森（Jason）与莱伦（Leron）完成。我们采用1m×1m的样方（quadrat），随机选取30个独立采样点。其中15个采样点位于受人类垃圾影响的区域，剩余15个位于未受影响区域。我们将人类垃圾覆盖率超过20%的区域定义为受垃圾影响区域，为确保评估一致性，仅由莱伦一人负责覆盖率的估算工作。需明确，本次统计仅将人类活动引入的、该林地环境中通常不存在的物品视为垃圾，不包括折断的树枝与自然枯叶。反之，若区域内人类垃圾覆盖率低于20%，则该采样点被认定为未受影响区域。我们记录了每个样方采样点中观察到的无脊椎动物（invertebrate）总数、不同无脊椎动物类群的数量及其具体名称。本次统计范围涵盖样方内部及样方设备表面的所有目标生物。我们佩戴手套轻柔移除采样区域内的叶片与垃圾，并检查附着在这些叶片和垃圾上的无脊椎动物，将其纳入计数范畴。对于种群丰度较高的无脊椎动物（以蚂蚁为主），我们将样方划分为4个分区，仅计数其中一个分区的个体数，再通过乘以4估算总种群数量。需注意，本次数据未包含死亡的无脊椎动物，仅统计移除垃圾、叶片及折断树枝后地表可见的存活个体，未挖掘土壤以调查地下无脊椎动物。我们同时记录了人类垃圾的组成。除单件物品单独标注外，我们尽可能将多数垃圾归类至所属通用类别。例如，糖果包装纸涵盖荷氏（Halls）糖纸、乐其适（Lickerish）包装纸、玛氏（Mars）包装纸、Oh Henry糖纸等，所有糖果/巧克力类包装均归类为糖果包装纸。