Species Assignments:
1. You will work independently. Everyone turns in their own stream
ecology paper.
2. This
means that even though we share data, your particular paper will be unique.
3. Everybody reports all the data. You must report all the data for all
3 days that we
collected it as a class.
4. For starter information, you may wish to check your
copy of George K. Reid's Pond
Life: a Guide to Common Plants and Animals of North American Ponds and Lakes
(Reid, 2001).
Report Format:
The field trip report must be typed, and include the following: abstract,
introduction, materials and methods, results, and conclusions.
 | Abstract
 | A short statement, not more than one page, which gives a quick
overview of the rest of the report. |
|
| Introduction
| The introduction will introduce the reader to important concepts for
the report. A review of pertinent literature is a must, and a good
review will be a good source of points. Typically, this might
include a hypothesis statement, but since there was no
"experiment" done, a hypothesis is not necessary. |
| Although we will all use the same dataset, every report can be really
unique because of the literature that you choose to cite in the
introduction. Is there one particular aspect of the report that
you like--perhaps the wetlands community, the insects, the crayfish, the
water quality? |
|
| Materials and Methods
| Unfortunately, many students simply cite "the lab manual"
for this section of most of their lab reports. Fortunately, there
was no lab manual for this exercise, and you must write your own
materials and methods section. Be sure to also include a
discussion of the study site, and feel free to include a map.
Include a mention of the formulae for Shannon Index and Evenness. |
|
| Results
| Straightforward, but points can be lost here due to poor
formatting. When presenting the data set as a graph, be sure to
include such important features such as units on your axes, and a clear,
easily understood legend. |
| Include calculations and resulting values for Shannon index and
evenness. |
| See data set below. |
|
| Discussion
| Be sure to relate the results to your review of literature. Is
what we found what you might expect from the literature that you found? |
|
| Literature Cited
| The format will generally be of APA style, but with particular respect
to that of papers typically found in Ecology (a journal easily
found in the library, or on J-stor). The strength of your
literature cited section will greatly affect the effectiveness of your
introduction and discussion sections, so be sure to spend plenty of time
finding literature. |
| Helpful websites on APA style:
|
| A minimum of five references are required. This section of your
paper will be graded on quality of sources, as well as their pertinence
to your report.
 | Maximum point yield will occur if all are either
primary or secondary literature from scientific journals such as
Ecology, Journal of Ecology, Journal of Widlife Management.
|
| Generally speaking, sources such as Time, Newsweek, and Scientific
American are magazines, and will result in moderate grade
reductions. |
| References to websites on scientific publications can be good (www.gaadoptastream.org
has great information) but references to bad websites will significantly weaken your
paper, so avoid getting any information from them. |
|
|
| Start early! The more time you give yourself, the more
complete your bibliography will be. |
| Educate yourself on your taxon by trying some basic resources
| Your copy of George K. Reid's
Pond Life: a Guide to Common
Plants and Animals of North American Ponds and Lakes (Reid,
2001) |
| Internet search engines such as Yahoo! or Google are fine for a
start, but not for finding good literature |
| Popular encyclopedic websites such as Wikipedia are ok to begin
with, but be aware that some of the information there may be inaccurate,
so always be sure to check it against more rigorously reviewed sources |
|
| Use the database search engines in both Galileo and J-Stor.
Galileo has two that are particularly good: Academic Search Complete and
Ecology Abstracts. Each has
its own strengths and weaknesses, so use them in combination.
| Here's a hint with using the online databases: learn how to use
each by clicking on its help button |
|
| When using databases, try experimenting with many different
combinations of keywords. Naturally "macroinvertebrates"
alone is too broad, and will come up with too many hits to be useful to
you. Likewise, "macroinvertebrates Clayton County October" is unlikely to yield any useful
information, as it is too narrow of a search. |
| Don't worry too much about finding articles about Georgia, or even about
the southeastern U.S. Good stream ecology occurs around the world! |
| Having trouble finding that obscure scientific journal in our
library? Try using our Interlibrary Loan Service! A free
copy of the scientific paper that you need may be available in as little
as a week when you request it from the "Services" portion of
the library's website. |