Ecology BIOL 2050 Lab 3 - Insect Abundance and Diversity (Dataset 1)

Group members: Kamil Adamczewski, Joelle Brooker, Brittney Jorisch, Karin Yosefi. Data for this experiment was collected at Danby's grassland and woodlot near York University on October 1, 2015 between 3:15pm and 3:38pm. The weather was sunny, mostly clear skies, and breezy with a temperature of 15 degrees Celcius. For this experiment, a 1 metre by 1 metre quadrat was used to sample the abundance and diversity of insects at both sites. The quadrat was thrown 10 times at each site for a total of 20 times (n=20). It was randomly thrown, there was no specific preference in throwing the quadrat in certain places. After throwing the quadrat, group members waited 1 minute to let the site that is being studied become stabilized. Then, the abundance of insects inside were visually estimated. Also, recognizable taxonomic units of the insects were accounted for by visually noticing any differences in structural features such as wing type, body type and colour. Since it was a cold day (15 degrees Celcius), not much insects were observed, thus the data collected was quite low. The purpose for collecting this data was to determine a correlation between the abundance of organisms in a defined area with the amount of diversity present.