Diversity Field Study - A Terrestrial Ecosystem

[Erin Nash]

In the space below, reflect on and extend your learning from our field study this week. Remember - this was the portion of the day where we each sampled a certain portion of forest - we examined the tree and insect diversity and abundance.

What did you learn about different tree species and insect species in general? What did you learn about actual sampling techniques?

Next, what did you notice about the forest in general....certain sections of it were different, so HOW were they different? Here is a hint - some of the forest was considered to be mature forest, and some of it was considered to be young forest - it had grown where an old field used to be. What differences did you notice?


Finally, explain what your area of study was (number and overall description) as well as its level of biodiversity.

[josh steltenpohl]

I found out that there was many different types of trees, but that only some types of trees were dwellers in certain parts of the forest. The insects in the forest seemed to be the same all the way through. My group found a lot of insects and had a big variety in the types of bugs.

The sampling techniques that we used to get the leaves and bugs were done the way they were because, the instructor wanted all of to get an accurate sample from the forest.

I noticed that down toward the creek the insects were a lot more dense and my section of the forest had a lot of tall trees. A little further down the forest gets shorter and a lot more thick. The mature forest was a lot taller and more spread out. The young forest was dense and there were a lot of smaller trees.

[james d green]

While doing this lab i was in a group with Blayr and Ivory, at first when the instructor, Dr. Rushin was telling us how to gather the information i was somewhat confused. I didnt understand why we were to go to the opposite sides of the trail. While i was wrapping the trees i realized thats it's because it gives more variety to species of tree!!
I also learned that there are ALOT of different insects in one small area of land, we picked up about 6 different types of spiders, chiggers, and other insects i wasn't sure of the name of.
The section of forest we were to study was a 'young' forest. I could tell that because there were alot more of smalles trees and smaller shrubs that have thin bark. When Dr. Rushin was guiding us though the back trails i noticed the opposite, bigger, thicker trees, with full foliage and fat trunks. Our section was station number 2, which was for obvious reasons the second station into the woods. The farthest station was number 5, after that they were making there way back towards 1. The station 5 group found bigger types of tree species that were mature and dark green. There were also more types of species back in the woods. My group only had three species, others had as many as 5 or 6.

[Shandis Cruz]

Going to Western I didn't expect to do anything with tree's, so I was completely surprised. I really enjoyed doing this experiment, partially because I like enjoyed being able to get involved with nature and learn more than just the name of the tree. I had no idea that there were so many different species of trees that inhabit such a small area. At first our sampling method seemed a little weird, I didn't really understand why we had to rope the trees we were sampling, but it didn't take long to realize that if we wouldn't have, we wouldn't have known which leaves to pick up.

The thirty meter area of eleven trees that Taylor an I tested consisted of four different tree species: Burr Oak, Black Oak, Rough Leaf Dogwood, and Virginia Creeper. One of the first things that we noticed was that all of the leaves looked similar, but when we brought them back to the classroom we were able to see that they weren't the same leaf. I thought it was really awesome that we were actually naming the trees that we discovered without the teacher being right over our shoulder telling us yes, were right and no, were wrong. It really made learning much more fun, therefore we were able to get much more out of the lab.

I found the forest in general to be awesome! It was filled with tons of different species of trees and plants. I was able to see that the trees toward the back side were more mature than the trees in the front. The more mature trees were much larger and seemed much more developed- the trunks were much thicker and stronger. The trees that were in the front were much smaller, some of the trunks were no thicker than my wrist.

[Taylor Woodruff]

I learned a lot about the different tree species. I never really realized how many different trees there could be in one little area. Like Shandis and I found out that out of 11 trees there were like 4 different kinds of leaves. We learned a lot of different names of leaves to go along with the ones we found like, the Virginia Creeper, Roughleaf Dogwood, Black Oak, and Burr Oak. It was really cool to witness Dr. Russian to be able to just take like one quick look at the leaves and know what kind of leaf it was. I would never be able to do that!

I also learned a lot able the different insect species. Just in a couple of scoops we found a whole bunch of different types of insects like, spiders, flies, and mosquitoes. Not only did we find these insects, but we found a lot of different species within those insects. It's weird to actually look at, lets say a spider, and then look at another spider, and be able to realize that even though they are both spiders they are different kinds of spiders. Before this lab I never really put much thought into what type of a certain insect it may be.

Well, the first thing I noticed was that it was pretty quiet, and I was expecting it to be filled with a whole bunch of noises coming from bugs and insects. But, later I learned that a lot of bugs don't really come out when it was as cold as it was. The trees weren't as tall as I was expecting them to be either, some of the trees that were around my area was only a little taller than Shandis and me. Also, the mature forest seemed to be much bigger and developed than the young forest, like the trees were bigger and much thicker.

[Laci Shoemaker]

When we went to Missouri Western, I wasn't expecting to do that much with trees, I was mostly expecting to just study the pond, but it turned out that most of our day went to studying the trees, and stuff. I learned that there are much more trees in a 30 meter area than I thought. Though my group only found like 8 leaves, there was a lot of trees and shrubs. I learned that there is a difference between trees and shrubs, I thought that since it had bark it was a tree, but I guess not. There wasn't that much insects as I thought there was going to be, since we kind of had a big area, I mean 30 meters isn't that small. When we did our three swipes over some vegetation we got like NO bugs, so I ended up catching a spider (YUCK!) and sticking it in our bag. So I learned that there are different bugs in different areas of the forest, maybe it's because of the sun and stuff. What I learned while sampling, was that there wasn't much bugs, but there was a lot of different varieties of trees.

While walking through the forest I noticed that some of the forest was thicker than the other parts, like for example some parts had bigger trees and less shrubs, while the part where my group and I studied was more of a young forest because it had real skinny trees and shrubs, and the trees weren't as tall as the other parts of the forest.

My group and I had area 8. It had a lot of different trees, but they were mostly small skinny trees and small shrubs. While studying we didn't really get that much bugs after we tried getting them for a long time, we just determined that maybe it was just an area where a lot of bugs didn't live. There was a lot of pretty trees, we only found about 8 different species of trees (Wild Grape, Black Oak, Red Cedar, Elm, White Ash, Privet, and Dog Wood) It was a fun day. :-)

[Aziz Siddikov]

That day ifound out lot of tings. there was many different typesof trees. butas we learned later on class with Dr.Rushin, there wasn't the same trees in differnt parts of forest.

We found a lot off inseckts. i never though that in small piece of land can be so much inseckts. twnety square meters, nine trees. the leafs that we took were similar in first look, bt when we brought them int the class and looked with more pation- they was so diferent.

I niticed that our territory of the forest was young, becouse webdidn't had big trees. there was th young trees.

[Blayr Bolton]

I actually was not aware that we would be doing a field study of the forest on our trip out to Missouri Western, but after getting through it I was pretty satisfied with what I learned. Before we started this experiment I wasn't exactly thrilled because of my lack of knowledge in regards to nature and terrestrial areas. When Dr. Rushin explained exactly how we would be sampling the tree's and insects, I still wasn't thrilled, but I soon would find out how much I could acquire just from our samples.

I actually learned quite a bit about trees in just our few hours of sampling. Before we started the sampling, I thought that we would find several different tree species because of the amount of tree's in our area and because Dr. Rushin broadened the description of a tree to five foot tall. On the contrary of what I thought, in our sample of 10 or more trees, we only found three different species of trees. They were Rough Leaf Dogwood, Burr Oak, and Elm. (Correct me if I'm wrong Ivory and James.) Only finding three different species was honestly disappointing to me because I expected to find a lot more variety, so I'm very curious to see how diverse our study really is when looking more into the Shannon Diversity Index.

As far as the insects went, we found a much more diverse study of insects than I expected. With just three swipes, even loooong swipes ;), I didn't plan on finding many insects because when looking from the naked eye through our tour in the woods with Dr. Rushin I had only seen two different bugs. We ended up finding 10 different species of bugs and that's if we even found all of them in our bag. If we found 10 different species in a 10 foot radius, than I can only imagine the amount of bugs that exist in the entire forest. I find it very intriguiging and eye opening that so many insects can live in such a small area and sometimes unseen area.

The sampling techniques we used in the terrestrial area as well as the pond ecosystem were very new to me. I wasn't sure before beginning our sampling what we would have to use to hold the insects; honestly I thought we would be picking up bugs and throwing them in a bucket. That just proved how uninformed I was about testing and how much more I learned during this experiment. It seemed as though nets were the answer and I believe that was the best technique we could have used because with the nets we can't pick and choose what bugs we want, it was the luck of the draw.

When going through everyone's data, I realized that not all sections of the forest were fully developed. The first few sections weren't as mature as the rest of the forest appeared to be. I was in section two, and I realized that our results weren't as diverse as other groups. We had just three different species of trees, while some of the older sections had up to six different species of tree's. I assumed that we were in a young forest area because of our less diverse field study and soon learned that I was right. I'm not sure when asking about our biodiversity if you want our number, but our's was .4321347 for the trees and .9020739 for the insects.

[Miranda Lynn Stanton]

when we were in the forest i was able to tell when we were in the mature forest and young forest. the mature forest was colder and the young forest was warmer because of the sunlight it let in.
the group i was in was where the two forest meet. there was a lot of poison ivy. that is about all we found. we had a combination of tall trees and trees that were not very big.

[Marcy Withrow]

It was cool to see the different types of trees from our sheet we got. Identifying what the tree species was from a leaf was a little complicated. But, in the end it all worked out. I found the different type of bark on the trees interesting. There was one tree, the Hack berry tree, where the bark was very weird. It was smooth and different from the other trees. I found myself examining leaves after the Lab experiment it was so fascinating.

I never thought about getting insect samples from a net. The net looked like a giant butterfly net. It was fun taking samples from the vegetation near the ground and seeing what was caught in the net. I found this technique a good way to collect a sample of insects. Deciding what tree to sample was amazing too. It's kind of like the luck f the draw. If the tree was a meter from the one across it, then we examined that tree. That seems like an accurate way to get data and decide what trees to observe.

The Mature forest, the forest I was in, had extremely tall trees. I also found that there was a lot of moss. Which makes since, because moss gross more in the dark away from a lot of sun. This means that not much sun shines in the mature forest. As for the young woods, they had a lot more shrubs and smaller trees. Also, Dr. Rushin showed us a granite rock from the ice age. I found that interesting in the middle of the woods. I knew it was possible, but it was neat to hear him describe why the rock was there. I also found it crazy that we're still in an ice age! Weird.

Ally and I were number 4. We were located in the mature forest. It had many hills, so the walk down was great, but back up the hills not so much. All the trees we sampled were very tall, most of the leaves were impossible to pick. A few trees we found were Burr Oak, Hack Berry, Black oak, and Bass wood. There were many insects, including a cute caterpillar we found munching on a leaf. We saw a massive tree that must have been struck down by lightning or old age. Back in the woods there were also ponds.

[Kylie Warner]

At Missouri Western, I didn't realize that we would be working with trees,too. And at first the things that came to my mind was cool... trees. But I honestly learned a lot. I never knew that there are so many different kinds of trees. To me, trees are trees. Leaves may not look the same but I never stopped to wonder just how many different types of trees can grow in one general area.

My group has only one tree that appeared to be "popular" in our area and that was the Dogwood. (Which is now my favorite thanks to the cool trick Dr. Rushian showed us.) But as for the rest of the area and what we found, it was pretty diverse. I liked it in class when we all held up and showed what we had because I always thought that trees in forest were all over the forest. I never knew that only some areas in a forest can only grow certain trees. I was honestly surprised. It was an eye open, truly.

My group couldn't find very many insects. We found maybe three or four different species of insects as opposed to some of the other groups who had a ton. I came to the conclusion after all the searching we did for them, that, probably in that general area, insects just don't come out as much. I taught myself a lot. I know sometimes, our group would get frustrated because there were no bugs or none of the leaves were the same, and then it always dawned on us, that that was just how the environment was. So I loved learning that.

Walking through the forest it was easy to pick out a young or mature forest. Some parts had huge trees and others not so much. In my area, I think that it was a young forest. None of the trees were towering necessarily. We could hop and grab branches easily and sometimes, debated on whether some of the leaves belonged to a tree or a shrub. The level of biodiversity was very high, not only in our area but throughout the entire forest. Back at the lab some groups had a lot of leaves the same and then some groups had three or four leaves that nobody else did.

[Hunter Ewart]

Honestly i was very surprised that we collected bugs because i didn't plan on doing anything with them. I learned that there are many different types of trees and the way the leaves are designed. In spot number there was a lot of poison ivy climbing up all the trees. So that made it difficult to find any samples of leaves with out touching the ivy. I rope used to mark of the sampling area is a smart way to do that because otherwise we would not of know how far to take samples from.

Location 3 had a combination of short and tall trees that were not very big around. The bugs we collected were 2 granddaddy long legs and several small spiders, and mosqeties. The tree types were burr oak black oak and honey locust. That you have to keep track of how many times you do something because otherwise you could mess the entire experiment up. You must right everything down in order to remember what the exact order of something is.

That you could really feel the temperature change between the two forest. Because being in the sun definitely warmed me up because it was a little chilly out there.That some of the land looked more leveled out and maybe possible a field was there at some point in time. there trees were different also there was more of a variety.

[Amanda Dixon]

i learned that in the older part there wasn't a wide variety of different types of trees. we had so many types of bugs and a lot of them because we were right by the creek. we had huge trees and had trouble getting leaves so j.t shook the trees and thats how we collected our leaves.

are section of study was area 5. are sampling techique was the same as the other groups so that everything would be accurate.

by the creek there were a lot more bugs I noticed that we had NO posion ivy. are forest was spread out with large dense trees, where as the young forest was compact with smaller trees.