An Investigation into Ground Flora Diversity and Abundance in Coppices of Different Ages - page 8
Keywords: An Investigation into Ground Flora Diversity and Abundance in Coppices of Different Ages Biology GCSE coursework
By slashwk on 23/11/2006 17:20:03
Level: GCSE Key Stage 4 (Years 10-11)
Page Number: 8 of 8 pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
flora, as they were lying on a path.
One problem was that it was difficult to estimate the exact percentage cover within a quadrat. This is because some flora fell inside more than one square within the quadrat, and also there were many more than one species per square. It would be very time consuming and inconvenient for us to take the time to count the exact amounts of different species within the quadrat, and to figure out their percentage cover, and therefore a different method of gathering information could be developed, possibly with the use of ICT.
Another issue that we encountered was that of identifying the different flora. It could take a significant amount of time to identify a certain type of flora, and sometimes we still wouldn’t know what it was as it wasn’t on the key. Yet again the use of ICT could help speed up the process, because we wasted valuable time on identification of species.
Something we have to bear in mind with our results is that they aren’t a true reflection of the coppices for the whole year. Our results are only a snapshot in time. If we wanted really reflective results, we could possibly visit the site a few more times during the year.
Another aspect about our methods that could have been improved was the fact that we included all types of grasses as just ‘grass’ and didn’t distinguish between the different types. Maybe one type of grass was better suited to surviving in the old coppice than in the new? We could find out if we repeated the investigation but this time distinguishing between the different types of grass.
To further our work, we could possibly investigate coppices of intermediate ages to see whether the diversity or abundance of ground flora species is any different. We could also do a much larger investigation into to fauna, to see whether fauna follows a similar trend. I predict that fauna will behave very similarly, but on a larger scale because fauna can transport further distances in less time than flora can. The factors affecting the fauna won’t be like the ones affecting the flora, but will instead be the flora themselves, as well as other fauna.
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