DOI: 10.6084/m9.figshare.3987315.v1
title: YorkU.forest.oct5-2016

description: <b>Site description: </b>This experiment was conducted in order to determine the abundance of trees, plants, vertebrates and invertebrates in the woodlands. The data collected was at York University Keele campus from 2:30 pm to 4:30 pm. The weather was 20<sup>0</sup>Celsius and it was mostly sunny with less wind. At the woodland, four different experiments were conducted and it took roughly 2 hours to gather all the necessary data needed.<b>Hypothesis:</b> The abundance and variety of herbaceous native plants will be higher in the woodland comparing with exotic plants because native plants are better adapted to the woody habitat.<b>Predictions:</b><b>- Prediction 1: </b>There will be a greater number of native plants than exotic plants found in the woodland.- <b>Prediction 2</b>: There will be no flower heads in the woodland.<br><b><br></b><b>Meta-data:</b><b><br></b><b>census: </b>The first in a series of data collection.<br><i><b>rep:</b> </i>The number of replications conducted for each experiment.<br><b>habitat: </b>Forest is a woodlot by York University Keele campus.<br><b>lat.long: </b>The latitiude and longitude of the site.<br><i><b>abundance.exotic.plants</b>: </i>The number of individual exotic plants we counted in each quadrat that we placed along the transect.<b><br></b><i><b>abundance.native.plants</b>: </i>The number of individual native plants we counted in each quadrat that we placed along the transect.<br><i><b>total.number.flowers</b>: </i>The number of flowers we counted in each quadrat.<br><b>Methods: </b>During the first experiment conducted, a quadrat was randomly placed every two meters along a 50 meter transect by alternating it left and right. The process involved identifying the number of native plants, exotic plants, and the total number of flower heads within each quadrat. The process was repeated 25 times and the total numbers were recorded in the data sheet. It was hypothesized that there will be less number of flowers in the woodland since there are less insects. There will be almost no pollination. The prediction made here is that there will be a greater number of native plants found in the woodlands than flowers since pollination of flowers by insects in the woodland is less. Quadrats were places randomly to ensure random sampling. After placing the quadrat, we had to distinguish between native plants and exotic plants, then each set was counted separately. The quadrate that was used is a 1 squared meter quadrate.ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ<b>Hypothesis</b>: Trees taller than 1.5 meters will be abundant in the wood land because they are better competitors for the resources available.<b>Predictions:</b>-<b>Prediction 1</b> : There will be a large amount and distribution of woody plants in the woodland.-<b>Prediction 2</b>: trees taller than 1.5 meter will not be close to each other.<br><b>Meta-data:</b><i>abundance.woody.plants: </i>The number of woody plants we counted every two meters on the transect and within half of a meter to either side.<b><i>canopy.cover</i>:</b> The percentage of how much sunlight is blocked by the canopy.<b>ground.cover</b>: The percentage of vegetation covering the ground.<b>total.flower.numbers (transect):</b> Total number of flowers counted within one meter on either side of the transect.<br><b>Methods: </b>The second experiment was conducted in order to determine the amount of woody plants in the woodland, canopy cover, ground cover and total number of flowers. The experiment was repeated 25 times. A straight line of 50 meters was measured using the transect and within 0.5 meters of either side of the transect, trees that were 1.5 meters in height were considered as woody plants. The abundance of trees in that region was recorded numerically and 0 was assigned to regions without any wood plants. Furthermore, for every meter across the transect, we measured the amount of canopy and ground cover in percentages through observation. The same process was used for recording the total number of flowers in each quadrant. It was hypothesized that, there will be a lot of woody plants in the wood land since the woodland is next to a forest. Since the woodland did not have a lot of insects, we predicted that there will be no flower heads in the woodland._______________________________________________<b>Hypothesis:</b> The amount of vertebrate, vertebrate species and humans will be less and abundance of , invertebrates will be greater in the woodland because invertebrates are better adapted.<b>Predictions :</b><b>- Prediction 1: </b>The abundance of humans will be less in the woodland.<b>- Prediction 2: </b>The number vertebrates will be lower in the woodland since the habitat is not suitable for their survival and the number of invertebrates will be greater.<br><b>Meta-data:</b><b>abundance.vertebrates: </b>The number of individual vertebrates observed within a fifty meter radius over fifteen minutes.<b>vertebrate.species: </b>different species that were observed.<b>abundance.invertabrates.observed: </b>The number of individual invertebrates observed within a fifty meter radius over fifteen minutes.<b>abudance.people: </b>The number of people observed within a fifty meter radius over fifteen minutes.<br><b>Methods:</b> The third experiment was conducted in order to determine the abundance of vertebrates, vertebrate species, abundance of invertebrates and the abundance of humans. A transect was used to measured 50 meters of open space in the woodland. We observed the surrounding visually for fifteen minutes for the abundance of humans at the woodland who were not part of the BIOL 2050 lab, the abundance of vertebrates and the abundance of number of species. We hypothesized that there will be less amounts of vertebrates and invertebrates at the woodland._______________________________________________<b>Hypothesis:</b> There will be less abundance of invertebrates in the woodland because they tend to hide in places where it is difficult to be reached by sweep nets. Thus, colored pans will reveal more abundance of invertebrates.<br><b>Predictions:</b><b>-Prediction 1: </b>There is a less number of insects captured by the sweep nets.-<b>Prediction 2:</b> There will be more abundance of insects in the colored pans since insects are more attracted to bright lights.<br><b>Meta-data:</b><b>abundance.invertebrates.pantraps: </b>Total abundance of insects captured using six different pan traps. There were three different color: White, yellow and blue<b> .</b><b>abundance.invertebrates.sweeps: </b>Total abundance of insects captured using the sweep nets walking along the transect ten times.<br><b>Methods:</b>The fourth experiment, pan traps and sweeping methods were used as the main tools for the experiment. 6 bowls were randomly placed 3 meters apart from each other at the woodland. The respective bowls were filled with soapy water and were placed in a white, yellow, blue pattern. After an hour, the abundance of invertebrate species in the pan were observed and recorded in each bowl. The second part of this experiment was conducted using sweep nets. After walking 50 meters along the transect at the woodland, the abundance of invertebrates was observed and recorded in the data sheet. The experiment was repeated 10 times. We hypothesized that since there is more disturbance that leads to less interactions between invertebrates and plants.<b></b><b> </b><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><b><i><br></i></b><b><i><br></i></b><br><br><br><br><br>