All of us had proposed our proposals a week ago and I mentioned that my proposal is about bird species richness. Each of us were paired up based on our similar focus of the subject. I paired up with Eric, who proposed on focusing on abundance of fig trees in several of land uses.
You may wonder, why did we paired up? Our focuses on subjects are different, one is animal and other is plant. Well, we have been told several times that fig trees cannot live without animals and animals cannot live without fig trees. Fig trees rely on animals to disperse seeds and increase chances of having offspring and animals rely on fig trees for food source. It is a circle of life.
So, what we are asking is does the land use influence either bird species richness or abundance of fig trees? AND which one, bird species richness or fig tree abundance, have a stronger influence on the other?
Currently, we are at Las Cruces and we will have an introductory hike tomorrow at the site, then we will have a better understanding of what we have to work with during our two weeks of stay here. Also, we are excited at idea that we could do some of the research at Las Alturas and at a coffee farm and that gave us more days of research than we originally planned.
In-field research, we will count number of bird species (not number of individuals) and number of fig tree individuals (regardless of which species, focusing on ficus genus), then we will have our statistical analyses on our data collections. Based on literature, we need to get started 30 minutes before sunrise for bird census (birds don’t care about our sleep) and in-field research will be needed to be done in mornings, the time is our primary limitation of our research but we can do it with potential of adding more days of data collections.
We still need to iron out details and will be ready to go with our newly revised methodology.
Stay tuned for our results!