Ecology BIOL 2050 Lab 2 - Grassland Dataset 1

Group Members: Kamil Adamczewski, Joelle Brooker, Brittney Jorisch, Karin Yosefi. This dataset was collected at a grassland near Danby Woodlot near the campus of York University in Toronto. It was collected on September 24, 2015 from 3:00pm to 3:15pm. The weather was sunny, partly cloudy, with a temperature of roughly 24 degrees Celcius. The grassland was fairly flat, had a patchy distribution of flowers/plants and had its grass cut over a month ago. The experiment consisted of throwing a 1 metre by 1 metre quadrat 20 times (n=20) onto the grassland. It was thrown randomly by group members after they had walked an unpredetermined amount of steps. After the quadrat had landed, the data for total abundance, % cover, % grass cover, and richness was collected. The purpose for collecting this data was to practice new sampling techniques that could be used to find correlations between variables being studied. For this dataset, the purpose was to find if there was a correlation between the total abundance of plants present in the quadrat to the cover size and number of species.