My poster is finished!

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This week I put the final touches on my poster for the Sage conference, now its time to finish my paper.  I have been working on my paper in sections throughout the year and have my introduction and methods finished.  Now it’s  time for the meat of the paper, the results and discussion.   It is going to be a long hard struggle the next two weeks as I finish up my paper and make sure it is at a professional level.  The end is in sight and it will be nice to take a well deserved break after all this work I have put in.

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I also had some encouragement from my research adviser, who said that he would like me to publish my paper.  He suggested that I combine my paper with Evangeline Forster’s paper who did the same common garden experiment but with Torrey pines.  If we decide to go this route it will mean another long year of research and writing but it will be worth it if we get a publication in the end.

Progress Update

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The past few weeks, I have been crunching numbers and analyzing my data. The past couple days, I have finally proven my hypothesis to be correct of the two watersheds not to be significantly different. The comparison of the two watersheds had to eliminate some of the  sites in Water Canyon to keep a high validity. Meaning, Water Canyon was surveyed from the upper most reaches to the ocean, while Quemada was only surveyed in the lower reaches. Water Canyon has a fault that runs through it, making the substrate in the portions near the fault to be drastically different from the rest of the watershed and Quemada. Those sites were eliminated from the comparison, as well as the sites in Water Canyon that were in the upper reaches with significantly higher slopes than Quemada. In the final analysis, Water Canyon had 11 sites and Quemada had 10. Both of which had similar substrate and slope. After running statistical tests, there was a high p-value of 0.8 between the two watersheds, meaning they are not significantly different. This was the case in multiple tests including: a unique species to total individuals ratio, evenness, and heterogeneity.

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The blue and purple regions on the graph indicate the site locations that were grouped together to run statistical analysis.