Data Analysis: The Beginning of the end

Well our data collection is completed...excellent.  However, this means that we will not be going to Warren Farm anymore to hang out in the woods.  Such is life.  From now on, our days will be spent in the Morrill computer lab analyzing our data and working on the construction of our project notebook. Our data analysis so far has consisted of entering all our collected data into Excel spreadsheets and creating several exploratory graphs.  One of these graphs shows a clear comparison of Hemlock DBH between zones.  This works well for the Eastern Hemlock, but we do not feel this will be an effective method for data analysis for other species because the abundance is significantly lower.  Perhaps a graph which displays all the species would be more appropriate.  We will be exploring this possibility in the coming days. We were also confronted with the issue of translating our northing and easting points from our GPS unit onto a useable map.  After some initial conversation, we realized that it would be simpler to use latitude and longitude (days, minutes, seconds) instead of northing and easting.  Of course, this required converting our northing and easting to days, minutes and seconds.  That's more algebra and trig than we wanted to do!

This was not an easy task at all.  After much googling, clicking and reading, we managed to find a preprogrammed excel spreadsheet that allowed us to enter our northing and easting and convert it directly to days, minutes and seconds.  We then entered this data into Google Earth and verified that the information was indeed accurate.  Here is what we found:

It's difficult to see in this picture, but all nine of our plots are present.  We noticed that while we did our plots in straight lines, they are not represented as such in the picture.  This is most likely due to the accuracy of the GPS unit and possible decimal rounding in the conversion process.  In the coming days, we hope to begin our project notebook and finalize the representation of our data.  I'm visualizing many more days stuck in front of a computer.  No fun for people who really like to be outdoors, but necessary in order to share our data with others.