Quadrat sampling of vegetation types in Yorku Grassland situated near Stong Pond

<p>The purpose of this lab is to determine the variety and composition of vegetation found within the grassland situated within York university grounds. The experiment was conducted in the grassland on the east side of campus near Stong Pond. The necessary and required equipments were one 1metre x 1metre quadrat. The data was collected on September 21st, 2015 at approximately 3pm. The temperature at the time was around 19 degrees celsius as well as it was sunny and partly cloudy with a little wind. There were several types of vegetation in the area. The most common ones noticed and was recorded in the data were the small yellow flowers that bloomed in clumps. There were small purple flowers that grew tall and as singles, white small flowers similar to the purple flowers. There were tall flowers that looked like a bulb at the top, it grew as a single flower. There was also another type of grass that grew all over the grassland, it was similar by shape to parsley leaves. There were weed like plants (leaves) similar to those from dandelion plants.The approach to sampling was random sampling. Once arrived upon the grassland sampling began at the edge where the grassland began. An object was thrown (anything thats solid like a ball) at random into the grassland, where the ball fell is where the quadrat was placed. Once the quadrat was placed the different types of plants were counted (richness) and how many plants in total in the quadrat was counted (abundance). Then one person estimated the percentage covered by grass and the percentage covered by other types of vegetation. Only one person did this job so that the estimations were based on one persons perspective avoiding biased data. The process of throwing the object at random and sampling the quadrat was done 25 times and observations were recorded in a table.