Woodlot Dataset 3: Sampling Adult Trees

This experiment was conducted on September 22, 2015 in the Danby Woodlots on the York University Keele campus between 4:40pm-5:10pm in collaboration with Naduni, Bryson and Stanley. The experiment was conducted on a bright, sunny day with clear skies with an external temperature of 22°C, however due to the canopy size of the trees in the Danby Woodlot, very little light got through and the actual site of the experiment was dimly lit. The purpose of this study is to get field training with plants and to familiarize myself with using sampling tools, such as transects, to collect data. This study was conducted by starting on the edge of the Danby Woodlot and using transect tape, we walked in a straight line towards the center of the Danby Woodlot. Every time we encountered an adult tree along our path (an adult tree is defined as a tree 2 times the observers height; at least 355.6 cm) we measured the diameter of the tree trunk at the observers breast height (137 cm) using transect tape. We also gave the observed adult trees a classification between 0-2 to represent the current state of condition of the tree (0 means the tree is dead, 1 means the tree is alive and 2 means the tree has a huge green canopy). Lastly, we also measured the distance between the current observed adult tree and the previously observed adult tree using the transect tape. After the 10th adult tree we observed, we ran out of transect tape so we used a random number generator and set the parameters to between 1 and 20 and got the random number 11. We decided to walk 11 steps North of where the 10th adult tree was and then set out the transect tape and walked in a straight line until we observed a total of 20 adult trees. The specimen of trees that were observed are Sugar Maples, or also known as Acer saccharum. This specimen was identified by observing the leaves of the studied trees and comparing then to the pictures provided in the Leaf Guide within our BIOL 2050 lab manual. The variables observed in this study were continuous and ordinal.