How the abundance of insects is affected by the size and condition of maple trees within close proximity, in the Danby Woods.

On October 13th, 2015 and Octover 20th, 2015 Muhammad Akram, Daniel Germani, Bonnie Duong and Markian Patwiak visited the Danby woods at York University in order to see if they could find a relationship between the size and conditioning of trees and the number of insects that could be found within 1m of 100 maple trees. We hypothesized that the size and conditioning of tree will have a direct correlatoin with the abundance of insects in the area. The number of insects present within a 1m^2 transect placed to the left (West) side of the tree was counted over a 60 second interval by all 4 members. Trees were categorized as either being dead and small, dead and large, alive and small, or alive and large based on greenery and evidence of trunk decay . The study took place over 2 days and over approximately 4.5 hours. On Day 1, October 13th, 2015 the data was collected from approximately 2:57pm - 5:05pm. Day 1 was a , cloudy day with moderate cloud cover, approximately 10km/h wind speed and a temperature of 15 degrees celsius. Data was collected from a total of 40 trees on this day, 10 from each category. Trees were analyzed from approximately 2:47pm-4:58pm on Day 2. It was also a moderatley cloudy day with slight precipiation throughout the time spent in the field. The temperature was at approximately 17 degrees celsius and wind speed was approximately 11km/h.