Experimental design training & your own experiment- Lab #4

The members who collected this data together were Adilah Ismail, Harshvir Hehar, Amrutha Balamurugan and Olivia Kazmierczak. The study sight was a grass land on campus which was cloudy and rainy the first day of collecting data and the second day was very sunny and very few clouds. Each day of collecting data was a week apart. Because of the time of year many of the species that are usually found in the grasslands had died because of the decrease in temperature. There was also minimal amount of trees in the grassland allowing a lot of sunlight the second day of observations. The grassland had very few trees and there were two major areas, an area with tall species including grass and an area with average height grass as well as other species. Most of the data collected for this experiment was done in the low height portion of the grasslands. This experiment took 2 hours on day one and 2 hours on day two to complete the observation component of the experiment. A quadrant (1 meter by 1 meter) was used to estimate abundance of each area where the white aster was found. The white aster grows in a clumped fashion making it easy to find a bunch together and lay out a quadrant around them. The abundance as well as height (in centimeters) as well as amount of leaves (greater than 3 cm) were also collected for the experiment using transacts. A total sample size of 117 white asters was observed recorded and data collected. The quadrants were placed each time a cluster of white asters was spotted, making sure no cluster was not recorded and the same one wasn’t recorded twice. The reasoning for this experiment is to view the relation that abundance has on the height (vertical space) of a white aster plant as well as the number of leaves it grows (horizontal space).