“There’s nowhere up but here!”: Externship Week 3

Nina here! To start off the third week of our externship, Trevor and I got back to work in R. We started making our own scripts to try to visualize our data and understand our results. I found a strong correlation between seed-set and fecundity and a correlation between seed-set and achene count (although the R squared value was small). I downloaded a database of plants of Minnesota from the USDA database that included information on whether or not the plants were native, threatened, or endangered as well as their fire tolerance and growth habit. I merged this database with the diversity data collected in the field in order to provide more data about each species. Next, I tried to calculate the percent of invasive and nonnative species for each plot. Meanwhile, Trevor calculated the means for the numbers of achenes in the top, middle, and bottom samples and determined whether or not there was statistical significance between pairwise comparisons of the findings. Next, he looked at confidence intervals for his findings. We both continued our work on our papers, writing up our methods sections specifically. As Trevor meant to say, there’s nowhere to go from here but up!