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.

[Ivory Baldwin]

Although i'm not an out door kind of person, i really liked this lab. I didnt expect we would be working with trees. Blayr, James, and I were in a group, we were in area 2. In our area when we tested our diversity of trees we found three different types of trees. Honey Locust, Elm, and rough leaf dogwood. We had to shake some of the trees to get some ofthe leafs down we even had to pull down the branches of the tree to get some of the leafs. There for more roughleaf dogwood then the other two. Our area that we tested in the diversity wasnt very high, our shannon diversity number was .4321347. We have five rough leaf dogwood and two honey locust and two elm. The rough leaf dogwood is actually a really cool leaf. I never thought i would call a leaf cool ha ha but they kind of do a magic trick

I also learned what poision ivy look like. It has three leafs and a red stem. The vine of the poision ivy grows up trees and other little vines grow out from that. I didnt know you could catch poision ivy by touching the vines of the trees i only though you could get it by the leafs

When we did the net activity we have to do three swips well our group did three swipes plus more. we did three swipes and did not get any thing in the net so we did like six more swipes. We actually caught a lot of bugs. I didnt think we would catch a lot but we caught about nine or ten different types of bugs. When we came back to the class room and started looking at the bugs i didnt know any types of bugs all i know was that we caught a bunch of little bugs like beatles and chiggers. We didnt have enough time to figure out all the real names of the bugs. The first thing of the day when we look at the birds was kind of wierd because of how they kept the birds in brown sacks. Blayr was really mad about it because it was kind of mean to keep a bird in a brown paper sack. I did get a really good picture of the cardinale though :)

aw how cute =)

[Hannah Rush]

I'm gonna sound like a big loser, but one thing that was AWESOME to me was when Dr. Russian did the trick with the dogwood leaf.

There were a lot of different types of trees in the forest. I remember seeing a lot of dogwoods. After Dr. Russian showed us how to tell if it was a dogwood or not, they seemed to be popping up everywhere. I remember seeing the pretty poison ivy vine that grew up the tree, and the honey locust trees. We walked around most of the trail, and I remember seeing a pond in the mature forest that had weeping willows by it, it was BEAUTIFUL! I learned the difference between a compound and a simple leaf. This helped us when we were out in the field gathering leaves.

There were a lot of different species in our section of the forest. We were not in the mature part of the forest, we were in the newer area and there were SOOO many dogwoods. We did our best to get as many different species as we could in our area, but it was kind of challenging. We ended up getting an elm leaf, and my favorite was the HUMONGOUS black oak leaf. I learned the difference between a burr oak leaf and a black oak leaf. The burr oak has rounded edges, while the black oak is more pointed. Nash gave me a booklet that had a lot of different pictures of leaves that we might find. It was pretty cool. My group had an issue with mistaking bushes for trees ;) haha.

There are a lot of cool pictures of the terrestrial part of the day.


The one thing that kind of creeped me out was the bird banding. I think it's cool, but it seemed kind of mean too. =/ Being able to see a cardinal that up close was awesome. (even though i felt really bad because the noise it was making was pretty disturbing) To weigh the birds, they shoved them down this cone looking thing and onto a scale. That was mean. Then to get them out...it seemed like they just flopped it out. It makes me wonder if they really do hurt the birds even though they don't think they are? We got to walk around the bird banding area and see the nets that the birds are caught in. While making our way back, we noticed a little yellow bird ( i forgot the name) caught in the net. Once again, I really wasn't too crazy about the whole idea, but then again, its really easy to see where the birds go throughout the U.S. which is pretty cool.

[Terra Younger]

Prior to going to Missouri Western we did a lot of background knowledge on the pond and shied away from the trees. But surprisingly, most of the day was dedicated to the forest lab.

I'm not complaining one bit. I thought the forest was really cool. It had a lot of different species in such a small area.

My partner, Aziz and I were in the "younger" section of the forest (we had the number six area). I could tell because all of our trees were small and in dire need of sunlight so there wasn't many around. Opposite of our spot were large oaks and the area around them was very shaded.

After collection our leaves and finding out which tree they belonged to, Aziz and I only had three different species of trees: dog wood, shagbark hickory and elm. All relatively small trees.

Our insects that we collected were more abundant. Aziz and I gathered a wolf spider, a couple lace wings, three mosquitoes and a tic.

[Shelby Hawkins]

I think one of the biggest things that I personally learned was about the Honey Locust tree. Well...not really biggest, but most memorable. I see trees like that in my woods, and have seen them around town before. However, I always thought it was some sort of disease or parasite that caused the tree to be like that, not the actual tree itself! I also really liked the trick that Dr. Rushin taught us about the dogwood leaf. I wish we could have spent time looking at the insects, but my group ran out of time.

We used the transect method of sampling. Not only did this look really awesome, but it was an effective way of gathering a random sample. How much is this method used compared to making a plot? What are the benefits and cons of each?

The older, mature forest was much taller. There was a lot less sunlights in it. Standing in the mature forest, you felt very secluded. My transept was in the new forest. There were some tall trees, but a lot of them were very small. Some were the same height as me!! There was a lot more sunlight and it seemed more spacious in the new forest. If I had to infer, I would say that there are more animal and insect activity in the old forest.

My group was #7. In our transect we had 6 different species of tree, including the honey locust, dogwood, Black elm and elm. We mostly had dogwood trees (GO MO!) They ended up being about half of our sample. Most of the trees in our transect were still fairly small. It was hard to find leaves for the honey locust tree because they had already fallen off. We just had to pick up little leaf bits off the forest floor. We also had a patch of calf-high vegetation where we took our insect sample. We thought it would be beneficial to take our sample from that space than on the path. For one, there was a lot of sunlight there, increasing activity. Also, we thought that if there was less human activity in that space because it was off the path then there would be more insects. Our group's shannon index for the trees was .73772 and the class total was .9964174.