FOR00101 - PlantPhysiology and Ecology - Physiology Assignment Help

Assignment Task

Terania Creek Basin

The exercise concerns the vegetation found in the Terania Creek Basin, which is located about 25 km north of Lismore in the Whian Whian State Forest in subtropical north eastern NSW. The diagram below comes from Turner,J. 1984. Radiocarbon dating of wood and charcoal in an Australian forest ecosystem. Australian Forestry 47, 79-83. Itshows, generally, how the vegetation in the basin changes from dry sclerophyll forest at the top of the basin slope, grading to wet sclerophyll forest further down the slope to subtropical rainforest near the bottom of the slope, along the creek edge.

Ecological survey

Some years ago, ecologists undertook a survey of the vegetation in a 900 ha area of the vegetation of the Terania Creek Basin. They established a 250 m × 250 m square grid, with a total of 144 plots located at the intersection points on the grid. At each point, they determined the presence or absence, within 20 m of the point, of each of 16 species (mostly tree species), species which they considered to be the important, dominant species which occur in the vegetation. The table below lists the 16 species, together with the type(s) of forest within which each normally occurs.

The diagram you are given below shows the grid, drawn to scale and with the 144 points numbered by their row and column number on the grid. In the spreadsheet you are provided with for this exercise (for00101_Prac_1_ Ecology_of_Terania_Creek.xlsx), you will find in the worksheet ‘Raw Data’ the entire data set which was collected. The presence (p) or absence (a) of each of the 16 species in each of the 144 plots is shown there.

Association analysis and plant community mapping

Your first task in this exercise will be to analyse these data, with a view to identifying and mapping the location of any ‘plant communities’ that occur in the survey area

For this exercise, we will define plant communities as areas of vegetation with similar associations of tree species. Thus, in a plant community particular species will be found tending to co-occur with one or more other particular species and often to the exclusion of some other species. Of course, no two patches of the vegetation will ever be exactly the same, but it may be possible to group together vegetation patches which are sufficiently similar in their species associations that we can identify them as plant communities. We will then assume that a particular set of environmental circumstances will be associated with the occurrence of a particular plant community.

In quantitative ecology, there are many complex mathematical techniques used to classify vegetation into communities. These techniques can be based on any number and type of characteristics, both qualitative and quantitative, about the vegetation measured in a set of plots.

For this exercise we are going to use a relatively simple classification technique known as ‘association analysis’. The only vegetation characteristic that association analysis requires is information on the presence or absence of species in a set of plots. This is exactly the type of data we have available for this exercise. Given such a data set, association analysis attempts first to identify a single species which more consistently co-occurs, with one or more other species, than does any other of the species. Areas of vegetation in which that species occur can then be considered as a plant community. Once such a species has been identified, the exercise is repeated to attempt to find a second species which defines a second community. This process continues until all the communities in the vegetation have been identified.

On pages 47-50 of Specht,R.L. and Specht,A. 1999. Australian Plant Communities. Oxford University Press, Melbourne you will find a relatively simple, worked example, showing how association analysis works.

A second worksheet ‘Analyze your data’, in the spreadsheet with which you have been provided, will allow you to conduct an association analysis for you on this entire data set, or any subset of the entire data set you wish to work with. You simply copy and paste the data subset you wish to consider into the blue cells in ‘Analyze your data’ and the analysis will be done for you.

You should proceed very systematically with your analysis to attempt to work out what plant communities exist in this vegetation. Firstly, you will copy the entire data set from ‘Raw data’ and paste it into ‘Analyze your data’. Note that whenever you do pastes in this exercise it is best to use ‘Paste Values’. You will find that the association analysis will identify a single species which you may then assume is the species which can be used to identify a plant community in the data set. The analysis will also list for you the numbers of the plots in which that species occurs. You should then identify those plots on your plot diagram above (best to photocopy it and use pencil in case you make mistakes as you do all this) and youwill then be able to draw boundaries around those plots where that species occur and so, in effect, map out where the plant community that species is identifying occurs.

Once you’ve done that for the first species, two possibilities then exist. It may be that there is one or more plant sub-communities which occur within the community you have just identified. To explore this possibility, you should take a sub-set of the raw data consisting of the data only for the plots in which the identifying species for that community occurred. In your tutorials, your lecturer will help you to learn neat ways of using EXCEL to extract subsets of the data for this purpose. You will then paste that data sub-set into the ‘Analyze your data’ worksheet. Note that when you paste a data sub-set into this worksheet you should clear its contents before you do the paste to make sure that none of the previous data set remains below the new data set you’ve entered, which may be smaller than the previous data set. You may find a new species identified which defines a sub-community of the first. You may then map that sub-community.

The second possibility is that a new plant community can be identified from the plots which did not contain the first species. To explore this, you will take a sub-set of the raw data which contains the data for those plots in which the first species was absent. If such a new plant community can be found, it can be mapped as you did for the first plant community.

And so you continue, taking ever smaller sub-sets of the data to identify further plant communities or sub-communities within the data set. Eventually the association analysis will be unable to identify further communities and the process will stop.

The final result of all this work will be a map, showing the distribution across the experimental area of the various plant communities which the association analysis has identified.

Ecology of plant communities

A detailed study was made of vegetation in the Terania Creek basin by J. Turner and J. Kelly (1981, Australian Forest Research 11, 201-208). A copy of their paper is appended below. Your second task in this exercise is to relate what you have found through your plant community mapping to Turner and Kelly’s results. This should allow you to draw some firm conclusions about what environmental factors are associated with the various plant communities you identified and how these relate to the distribution of those communities across the landscape.

Your report

To assist you in this exercise, your lecturer will conduct one or two two-hour tutorials with you in the computer lab for Lismore students and over the internet, using Blackboard Collaborate for external students.

Your report will be of 1,500-2,000 words. It should be structured as a normal scientific report with Introduction, Methods, Results and Discussion & Conclusions. The methods section need only be brief, since the methods are spelt out in detail in these notes; there is little point in you simply repeating what is written here

My concern is with the quality, not quantity of your report. Its quality includes its structure, its English expression (which includes spelling and correct grammatical usage) and, most of all, its scientific content. The report should be written as if it was attempting to explain to an ecologist, who knows nothing in particular about the Terania Creek Basin, thecharacteristics of its vegetation and how it relates to the environmental circumstances of theBasin.

This FOR00101 Physiology Assignment has been solved by our Physiology Experts at onlineassignmentbank. Our Assignment Writing Experts are efficient to provide a fresh solution to this question. We are serving more than 10000+ Students in Australia, UK & US by helping them to score HD in their academics. Our Experts are well trained to follow all marking rubrics & referencing style.

Be it a used or new solution, the quality of the work submitted by our assignment experts remains unhampered. You may continue to expect the same or even better quality with the used and new assignment solution files respectively. There’s one thing to be noticed that you could choose one between the two and acquire an HD either way. You could choose a new assignment solution file to get yourself an exclusive, plagiarism (with free Turnitin file), expert quality assignment or order an old solution file that was considered worthy of the highest distinction.