Essay On Sagebrush Community

While determining the differences between two different sagebrush communities and the north/south aspect, I accept my hypothesis that there was a differences in the plant cover in a sagebrush community that has seen burning, and/or on a north aspect. The data shows that there are clear differences between the burned/unburned sites and the north/south aspect sites. The only time that two of the sights had the same amount of plant cover of the same plant community was in Figure 1 where there was the same amount of trees. However as previously mentioned their standing of a 2.5% means that that plant community was not overserved at all. Also as the burned and unburned sites took place in a sagebrush community, trees would not be commonly found, fire or no. Figure 1 shows that there is less litter and sagebrush in the burned area. The fire would have burned up any available little on the ground, and destroyed a fair amount of sage, which takes a few years to regrow. Figure 2 shows that there is much large amount of tree cover in the north aspect than the …show more content…
Having to two quadrats would not only move things along quicker but it would also keep everyone engaged. Some errors that may have taken place are human errors. The Daubenmire methods is based sorely off of the judgement of the people who are using it. Therefore, it would be safe to say that not all of the observation were 100% accurate. Another thing that may have affected the data is the time of year that the data was taken. By late summer, most grasses and forbs have been grazed on at some point by various wildlife. Some plants have already have died at that point as well. This would skew that data as grazing would affect the quantities of the grasses and forbs, and plant mortality would have added to the amount of litter