Insects in woodlot and grasslands found using a quadrat

Our Data was collected on September 29, 2015 at approximatley 3:20pm-3:50pm at the York University Keele campus. It was about 18 degrees C on this afternoon with minimal to no sunlight from cloud coverage, constant precipitation and wind the entire time working there. In the above table, the abbreviation "g" was used for grasslands and "w" was used for woodlot. Myself as well as my group Katie, Adam, Ashley and Ava worked together to collect the above data. We hypothesized that because of the weather conditions we would not be able to find many insects or diversity of insects with mainly finding ants or worms. The experiment comprised of taking the quadrant and placing it in 10 random locations throughout the woodlot and 10 in the grasslands. None of the locations were particularly close to eachother and we tried to pick locations that were different from one another, for example one in the grasslands consisted of short plants and some small flowers while other locations were in the tall grass with bigger plants. Once quadrants were placed, we then would look throughout the entire area of the quadrant and recored the number of insects found, as well as their taxonomic units. This technique was done both in the grasslands and in the woodlot and the total area observed was about 100 by 100 feet. As predicted, there was not a large count of insects found, but there was more variety in insects then originally thought. Many ants were spotted as well as a couple of snails, crickets, spiders, flies, pill bugs,small moths and one worm and one large praying mantus. A total of 72 insects were found between both the Danby woodlot and grasslands.