Distribution and Abundance of the Lower and Upper Terraces of Putnam Park.
Biodiversity plays a huge role in the environment. The biodiversity of Putnam Park has stayed the same over many years. In order to understand why biodiversity is important we must first know that without it our forests would slowly become smaller and smaller. One of our firsts goals will be to determine the differences in abundance and distribution, to see if there is an underlying reason for the difference also. Is there is a difference between the upper and lower terrace? Would it affect the biodiversity?.
Methods.
Putnam Park is located in Eau Claire, WI. It contains over 400 varieties of plants and has a variety of tree species like, Bitternut Hickory, Basswood, Butternut Walnut, Silver Maple, Green Ash and Hackberry. There are two different terraces that will be examined. The lower one is along the Chippewa River, which does flood often, while the upper terrace is located more up a slope. A hiking path divides the terraces. Putnam Park is also a protected area so there is no logging.
We examined quadrats on both the upper and lower terrace. The quadrats were round and 100 m in size. We recorded all trees that were alive and more than 5 cm in diameter. Most trees were over 5 cm except for the new ones that were growing off older parent trees. The experiment was done by haphazard sampling, not random. T-tests were used at the end to compare means and find the significance to see if there were differences between the two terraces in terms of abundance and distribution.
Results.
The upper terrace had more diversity and but actually less abundance than the lower terrace (Table 1). The upper terrace had more species with higher Shannon diversity. We cannot say though that the evenness in the upper mean was any different than the evenness in the lower terrace since the p-value wasn't significant. The upper terrace may have more tree density than the lower but since the p-value was so close to the significant mark we cannot be certain.
