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.