Progress Update

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.

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