Paper details
For lab report 2, you will be determining whether there are differences in habitat types for a number of
community measures. The three habitat types are:
1) rock
2) sand
3) tide pool
The images were taken earlier this fall by our TA Jessica while in Alaska. See Habitat pics in Moodle for the
images you will use. In each folder you will find one pic of the entire square quadrat (area in which you
sample data) and multiple close-ups of the same square quadrat in case you have trouble seeing what is
there.
For the quadrat in each habitat type, you need to record the following:
1) abundance of each type of organism: mussel, Balanus barnacle, Chthamalus barnacle, kelp,
filamentous/foliose macroalgae, worms, anemones, bryozoans
2) species richness
3) shannon-weaver diversity
4) evenness
5) similarity between each pair (rock & sand, rock & tide pool, and sand & tide pool)
You should then make a bar graph of richness, diversity, and evenness in Excel.
For lab report 2, you will only be writing the results, discussion, and literature cited sections. Please see the
guidelines for writing reports in Moodle. For the results section, you should have text and graphs, and you
should tell what the results were without explanation of why the data may have been similar or different. In
the discussion section, you need to explain why the results may have been similar or different among the
habitat types. You also should compare what you found to what researchers have found before or what is
typically expected for these habitats and cite their studies. Note there are other things that also must be
addressed in the discussion section as listed in guidelines.
Your report must have at least 2-3 pages of text (not including literature cited) and 3 graphs. You must cite
at least three primary literature articles