Ecological Projects - Hints And Tips (HATs?!)

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Key points

List of HATs (short, but growing!)

In this series of pages, I plan to bring together assorted notes intended to help students who are planning to undertake an ecological project. Basically, your ecological project is a mass (hopefully not a mess!) of questions:
 

What questions do you want to address in your research? How are you going to frame these questions with sufficient precision? What data do you need to gather - and how will you do it? How are you going to analyse your data - what statistics will you use and will your data be sufficient for valid conclusions? Are you confident that you can complete the project on time - and meet its objectives in full? What other questions have we forgotten? ???

These notes are oriented towards projects involving the description of biological assemblages (and their environments) and have been relevant to projects be at various levels of study, but perhaps mainly final year undergraduate and postgraduate.

The principles behind the advice are equally applicable to any environmental scientific investigations, though naturally detailed applications will vary considerably.

First of all,

1. Have clear aims for your project. What questions are you wanting to investigate? You need to be quite precise about this and the scientific method of stating clear hypotheses to be tested is a good approach to follow. This will determine the data you need to collect and the form of analysis required.
2. Be pragmatic. Make sure you can achieve the aims set out by point A. You know what your time constraints will be and the resources at your disposal, so make sure that you will be able to get the necessary work done. This relates to how long your field trips will take (and how often), how many samples you need to take and how long each one will take to process (sorting, preservation, identification, counting, recording quantitative data). Don't over-stretch yourself - it's much, much better to complete a good (or even excellent!) project than fail to finish one which might have been superb.
3. Disaggregated data should be recorded. By "disaggregated" I mean that you should store your data in the computer in as raw a form as possible - completely untreated - and in a format (as simple as possible) appropriate for statistical analysis. This will depend on what software you will be using, but I reckon the best starting point often is plain text (ASCII) files which can usually be processed into any decent software package. In the computer you can generate your data summaries/combinations (means, pooled values, etc.), but having the raw data means that you can always go back again to the beginning and try a different line of analysis if required.

1. Ecological Sampling Designs

3. Species Diversity

4. Problematic aspects of describing terrestrial invertebrate communities