TEACHING ALL VOLUMES SUBMIT WORK SEARCH

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SYNOPSIS DESCRIPTION NOTES TO FACULTY STUDENT DATA DOWNLOADS

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Week 1: Methods for Line Transect Sampling

      All science starts with people looking at the world, whether it be the physical world or the world of living organisms. We observe patterns or phenomena in the world and we want to know why these things happen. What causes these patterns? Why are plants green? Why does one field have a higher number of species than another field? Why do so many different species of plants and animals grow in tropical areas?

      This first plant ecology lab has to do with the process of making observations and then developing hypotheses that may explain the observations made. The goals of this lab are to make some detailed observations of the distribution of some plants on the Mary Washington Campus. We will use one of many field sampling methods to make observations over an obvious change in plant types, quantify the plant distributions, and develop a list of hypotheses about why we think these plants change as they do over this distance.

The goals of today's lab are:

1. Observe part of the diversity of plants on campus,
2. Use the line transect sampling method,
3. Sample and quantify the plant cover over a three (3) meter distance,
4. Make observations of the physical environment over the same 3 meter distance,
5. Write down hypotheses about the causes of any observed changes in plant cover over the 3 meter distance.

      We will go to a woodlot near Jepson Hall for this lab. I will split the lab up into groups of 3 - 4 students and assign each group to an area of study. [Caution: Poison ivy is very common in this wood lot. I have attempted to choose places that do not have poison ivy. But, please be on the look out for poison ivy that I did not see.]

Materials:

• 2 stakes or wire flags per group * 4 groups = 10 stakes,
• 3.2 meters of string per group * 4 groups = 16 meters string,
• 1 meter stick or tape measure per group * 4 groups,
• Record tables in lab notes,
• A mallet

Procedures

1. Place two stakes three (3) meters from each other so that one is in the lawn and the other is in the forest edge,
2. Attach a length of string to the top of each of the stakes,
3. Make all observations looking straight down on the string (i.e. the vertical plane of the string.),
4. Note all the species of plants that intersect the vertical plane of the string,
5. Someone will act as temporary “herbarium” for the rough identification of plants. The plants that each group observes will be named consistently across all class groups. When you find a new (i.e. previously unnamed) plant, take a leaf to the herbarium for identification. The herbarium technician will match this plant material to an existing specimen or give the plant material a new name and catalogue the plant,
6. In 0.5 meter sections, estimate the percentage of the length of string intersected by each of the observed species,
7. Record this percentage. Note that the total percentage cover, for this line transect method, can be greater than 100 % because there may be multiple layers of plant canopy,
8. Answer the questions that follow the data sheet,
9. List as many hypotheses as possible that may explain any changes you quantified in this sample. Use your imagination and think broadly about the forces that may be acting here. I would also stress that open mindedness is a key to good science at this point in the process. If you think you know the right answer, this bias may lead you into bad science.

Data Sheet
      (note: to download a formatted copy of this data sheet: PDF version (68k), DOC version (35k))

	Group 1		Group 2		Group 3		Group 4
Section	Plant ID	% Cover	Plant ID	% Cover	Plant ID	% Cover	Plant ID	% Cover
1
2
3
4
5

Data Analysis:

A. Organize your observations:

      1. Did you find any of your species live in all five sections of your line transect? Name them.

      2. Did you find any of your species did not live in all five sections of your transect? Name them.

      3. Which species had the greatest % cover in each of the sections? Did the species with the majority % cover change over the five sections of your line transect? Name them.

      4. Did the total % cover change over the five sections? How did it change?

      5. What physical characteristics would you measure across this transect that may correlate with species composition changes?

B. List the falsifiable hypotheses that may explain any changes in species composition changes:

      1.
      2.
      3.
      4.
      5.
      6.
      7.

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Week 2: Quantifying Observations

      You’ve made some initial observations at our research plots at Belmont. You also have some background about the prairie grassland developed by Beate Jensen and information about how our research plots have been treated. Different questions may be popping into your head at this point and that is good. Over the next few weeks you’ll be clarifying these questions / hypotheses. You will also need to collect data about the current distributions and abundances of plants in our research plots.

Objectives for today's lab

1. Share, clarify, and expand qualitative observations,
2. Record all observations,
3. Collect data on plant distributions and abundances, using line transects.

Decisions to Make:

1. How should we sample this research plot?
   
   
   1. What variables should we collect?
   2. How do we sample common species?
   3. How do we sample rare species?
   4. How intensively do we sample?
   5. What variables can you create from the data you collect?
2. How do we identify different samples across the whole class?
3. What physical / abiotic variables are you interested in measuring here?
4. What do you need to measure that you haven’t measured?

*** Some proposal requirements ***

       Each proposal must address at least 4 hypotheses / questions.

       Each proposal must include at least 2 independent variables in the proposed research.

       Only one of the independent variables can be an abiotic factor, but one of the 2 independent variables does not have to be an abiotic factor.

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Week 5: Guidelines for Research Proposals

MWC Plant Ecology, Fall 2003: PROJECT PROPOSALS FOR RESEARCH AT BELMONT ESTATES
Principle investigator: Your name
Co-investigators: Names of others in group
Address: Email:
[All text not marked is Times New Roman, 12 pt.]
[Use single spacing]
[Leave an extra space after the end of each paragraph]
[Leave a space after each heading]

PROJECT TITLE: [Small Caps, Bold, 12 pt.] {Give it a descriptive name}

BACKGROUND AND NEED: [Small Caps, Bold, 12 pt.]

       The research that others have done. This section is where you provide the literature review of the topics related to your hypotheses. This should be a concise, but thorough coverage of the background information that any reader needs to understand the rest of the proposal. It is like an Introduction of a scientific paper. But, it should go further to show how this research would fit into the work that's already been done in this area of research.

       The information covered in this section should be broad and conceptual. If your hypotheses are about herbivory and the defensive chemicals that plants produce in response to these, then provide a review of the literature related to these concepts.

       As you address "Need," think about the issues that may be connected to the results of this research. Could there be some practical application of this research and this is one step toward that application? Why do you believe we need to do this kind of research? You might wish to take some cues from the literature that you have read for this literature review. What have other researchers said about the need, significance, and importance of this general area of research?

OBJECTIVE: [Small Caps, Bold, 12 pt.]

       The research that you plan to do. This section is a extended statement about what you wish to achieve through doing the proposed research. This is a chance to state broadly what you will do and hope to accomplish by doing this research. This section is the place to state and discuss broad hypotheses using conceptual variables. An example will make clearer the difference between conceptual variables and the independent and dependent variables in your experimental hypotheses in the next section. Let's say your experiments will investigate the effects of competition on the abundance of a rarer plant found in the garden at Belmont. In the "Objective" section of your proposal you might state a conceptual hypothesis as "Plant X is rare in this vegetation plot because it is a poor competitor for nutrients and is outcompeted by other species of plants." Competition is a conceptual variable because it can not be directly measured in the experiment you will propose.

       Objectives must develop the connections among your variables. This means that your variables must fit into some larger picture and you need to paint this picture for the reader. For example, let's say 2 of your conceptual hypotheses are 1) Species diversity will be higher in sunny areas than in shaded areas and 2) Species diversity will be higher in soils with more available water. Again, your broad conceptual interests are with interspecific competition, but here you are looking at competition and its impact on the diversity. Your motivation for investigating light levels and soil moisture at the same time may be to sort out which of these variables is the most important factor in determining species diversity in a plot. You would need to take some time to describe the potential relationships between light levels and diversity and between soil moisture and diversity.

       This section should be used to place your research in perspective relative to other research that has been done. Is it a repetition of other research that has not been well researched yet? Is it new research that has never been done? Is it a practical application (repeat) of past research using a species or species that are of some special interest?

EXPECTED RESULTS AND BENEFITS: [Small Caps, Bold, 12 pt.]

       This section is where you go through your hypotheses / questions one by one. State the expected results of the tests of your hypotheses. Be sure to relate these testable hypotheses back to the conceptual statements you made in the previous section.

       This section would be an appropriate place to include the observations and background data that you've collected. This is the information that motivated your hypotheses in the first place

       Each proposal must address at least 4 hypotheses / questions. Each proposal must include at least 2 independent variables in the proposed research. Only one of the 2 independent variables can be an abiotic factor. This means that your proposed research must include at least 1 biotic factor as an independent variable.

       State what you believe will be the benefits of the outcome of your research. These benefits are more specific than the "Need" in the first section. What knowledge will we have gained by doing this research and how can this knowledge be used? How will you and others benefit from these results.

APPROACH: [Small Caps, Bold, 12 pt.]

       You must describe your experimental designs completely in this section. There must be proposed experiments for each of your hypotheses. I would like you to propose experiments that can be done on the plot of land at Belmont, but this is not a requirement. The requirements for your experiments are:

1. Some of the proposed experiments must be controlled experiments in the field,
2. At least one of your experiments must be an experiment that will answer all or part of a particular hypothesis, and be a laboratory or greenhouse experiment. Picture this as an experiment similar to a field experiment, but with more control OR an experiment that is not practical to do in the field,
3. Observational experiments can be proposed. Let's say you hypothesize that a particular rare plant becomes less abundant in drier soils. An observational experiment would be to sample (count) different patches of this plant, measure the soil moisture at each of these patches, and look for correlations between these measures.

LOCATION: [Small Caps, Bold, 12 pt.]

       Describe where you will do the research you are proposing.

REFERENCES: [Small Caps, Bold, 12 pt.]

       Use the style and formatting shown in my sample proposal. For unusual reference types, keep in mind that the reader MUST have enough information to re-find that reference from your proposal references. If the reference type is not represented in my examples, ask me.

Note: It is difficult to say where your descriptions of the Belmont plots will fit. It may be appropriate to place this in different sections of the proposal.

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Week 6: Guidelines for Annotated Bibliographies:

      An annotated bibliography is a list of bibliographic references with a description of the information you found in the reference. The kind of information you include in the annotation will depend on your needs and purpose for compiling the bibliography.

      Bibliographic style (i.e. form and format) differs greatly from source to source and journal to journal. There is some general rhyme and reason to these styles, but the best way to figure out how to format your references, in a particular bibliography, is to follow an example exactly. I would say that one generality for bibliographic style is to make the form and format of each type of reference, within an individual bibliography, exactly the same. If you keep your own bibliographies, find a style you like or will be forced to use often and stick to it. If you must prepare a bibliography for someone else, get examples from them and follow the form exactly.

      The references should be arranged in alphabetical order, by the first word in the reference. Most references will have the last name of the first author as the first word in the reference.

      As stated above, the text you write to accompany each reference will vary based upon your needs. For our purposes, this text should include several things.

1. Give some information about where the authors are from. Is this a university / college researcher? Is this an employee of a branch of the government? Is it an unknown, unreviewed author from the internet?
2. Describe the questions the authors of the research were answering, as they apply to your own research. You don't need to talk about aspects of their research that do not apply to your research.
3. Describe the results and conclusions that are pertinent to your research.
4. An annotation differs from an abstract by adding information about the quality and usefulness of each reference. One of the indications of appropriateness of the research may be the institution for which the researchers work. Website information is often of questionable merit and the "grey literature" on the web must be evaluated carefully. You should also include in each annotation how this research is related to, illuminates, or informs the topic of your research. You might also indicate the general usefulness of each reference. Describe how useful this reference was for your research and why it was or was not useful. If any of the methods, results, or conclusions seem biased or questionable, it is appropriate to voice this kind of evaluation in the annotation.

Bibliography style:

• Carulli, J. P., and D. E. Fairbrothers. 1988. Allozyme variation in three eastern United State species of Aeschynomene (Fabaceae), including the rare A. virginica. Systematic Botany 13: 559 - 566.
• Demesure, B., N. Sodzi, and R. J. Petit. 1995. A set of universal primers for amplifications of polymorphic non-coding regions of mitochondrial and chloroplast DNA in plants. Molecular Ecology 4: 129 - 131.
• Hanski, I. A. , and D. Simberloff. 1997. The metapopulation approach, its history, conceptual domain, and application to conservation. Pages 5-26 in I. A. Hanski and M. E. Gilpin (eds.). Metapopulation Biology: Ecology, Genetics, and Evolution. Academic Press, NY.

Example Annotation:

• Christian, C.E. 2001. Consequences of a biological invasion reveal the importance of mutualism for plant communities. Nature 413: 635 - 639.
  Dr. Christian did this research while at the Center for Population Biology, University of California, Davis. Research on mutualisms and their impact on plant communities have been a neglected area of research. Therefore this is an important paper because it verifies an ant-plant mutualism, a very common mutualism, as an important factor determining plant community composition. The broad questions that this paper answers are, "Will an invasive ant species change an ant-plant mutualism and, in turn, change plant community composition? Dr. Christian did her research in the Fynbos region of South Africa a region with a Mediterranean climate. She found that the invasive Argentine ant (Linepithema) decreased the populations of two native ant species. Seeds of the region fell into 2 broad size categories, large and small seeds. The 2 native ant species that were impacted also were most likely to bury large seeded plants underground. After fire, ant invaded areas had significantly fewer large seeded plants than uninvaded areas. The data presented here were simple and convincing.

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Week 9: Oral Presentation Midpoint Assessment Form:

Plant Ecology - Week 9: Oral Presentation Midpoint Assessment Form, Date: ___________________ Group presentation #1 Speaker: __________________________ Evaluator:____________________ Use the follow scale to rate the presenter.      1 = did not meet minimum expectations      2 = adequate      3 = very good      4 = excellent
Content and organization: _____ speaker’s role in presentation clear _____ transition from previous speaker smooth _____ speaker’s role well developed	Delivery: _____ enthusiasm _____ eye contact _____ enunciation _____ volume / projection _____ personal appearance _____ comfort of presentation (does not read notes / slides) _____ slide use effective _____ rate of presentation
Presentation as a whole (group grade): _____ all required material included _____ hypotheses / questions clearly stated _____ sufficient background included Positive feedback: Constructive criticism:

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Week 11: Guidelines for Peer Reviews of Research Proposals:

      The purpose of this peer review is to provide the writer with some solid, positive feedback on the current state of their proposal. This will provide some guidelines for what you might look for in these papers at this time. Trust your instincts while reading / reviewing papers. If something does not make sense, it is usually a writing problem and not a reading problem. Be positive and be specific. In addition, ask and answer the following questions:

Do the objectives clearly state what the researcher hopes to accomplish by doing this research?

Do these objectives do a good job of making connections among the hypotheses that will be tested?

Are the initial observations and background data we collected incorporated into the proposal in a way that makes sense to you? This does not mean it was done in the way you would do it or did it.

Are the hypotheses clearly stated?

Is each of the hypotheses addressed by at least one experiment?

Does each experiment include the independent and dependent variables as stated in the hypothesis? In other words, does the experiment test the hypothesis as the hypothesis is stated?

Take a quick look at formatting. Does it conform to the Guidelines?

      Always remember and never forget. Any writing should be clear and understandable without interpretation from the writer. So, when a reviewer finds something missing or unclear and the writer says, “Oh, that is what I meant in the section Z when I said W,” the writer needs to make some changes. Never assume that the reader simply misunderstood your “perfect” writing.

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Week 12: Oral Presentation Final Assessment Form:

Plant Ecology - Week 12: Oral Presentation Final Assessment Form, Date: ___________________ Group presentation #2 Speaker: __________________________ Evaluator:____________________ Use the follow scale to rate the presenter.      1 = did not meet minimum expectations      2 = adequate      3 = very good      4 = excellent
Content and organization: _____ speaker’s role in presentation clear _____ transition from previous speaker smooth _____ speaker’s role well developed	Delivery: _____ enthusiasm _____ eye contact _____ enunciation _____ volume / projection _____ personal appearance _____ comfort of presentation (does not read notes / slides) _____ slide use effective _____ rate of presentation
Presentation as a whole (group grade): _____ all required material included _____ background sufficient and appropriate _____ hypotheses / questions clearly stated _____ experimental designs clearly articulated and complete Positive feedback: Constructive criticism:

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Week 13: Research Proposal Final Assessment Form:

Plant Ecology - Week 13: Research Proposal Final Assessment Form General goal:       25% of grade for format and writing quality       75% of grade for content
Title Page:	5 pts.
Within text titles:	5 pts.
References:	10 pts.
Misplaced information	5 pts.
Background and Need: Are each of the hypotheses / questions sufficiently discussed in the background?	4.5 pts.
Does the author talk about the need for this research? Is it convincing? Is this a broad view relative to the objectives?	4.5 pts.
Objectives: Are the connections among the hypotheses / questions developed?	10 pts.
Is this a broader perspective than the benefits?	3 pts.
Does this section broadly state what author plans to do?	10 pts.
Expected results and benefits: Are hypotheses / questions with variables clearly stated and expected results some how included?	4 pts. per hypothesis or question
Are the background data and observations appropriately included? Are the benefits specific to author’s results?	8.5 pts.
Approach: Does each experiment match the variables as stated in the hypotheses?	12.5 pts.
Is the description clear? Are “treatments” distinguished from “treatment levels”? Is replication addressed? Is random / non-random assignment of treatments and treatment levels addressed?	10 pts.