Data Collection

Data collection has been a learning experience for our group so far. We went to Montana de Oro one afternoon this week where we spent a few hours looking for snails in between the rocks close to shore. We brought a length of twine with us onto which we marked off multiple meters. This twine helped us determine the location of the quadrats on the beach that we used a random number generator on my phone to come up with. As a group we decided that we would work with quadrats that could range from 20 meters into the water, and 50 meters down the beach. Once we located our first quadrat out on the rocks we made our 1x1 meter square and counted the snails present. We came up with about 140 snails and decided the size of the quadrat needed to be smaller; a .5x.5 meter quadrat was the most logical step. This was one part of the data collection that we tweaked to make collection easier. Once the size of the quadrat was adjusted, collection went more smoothly. The final thing we learned that day was that checking the tide was essential to our success. As we neared the end of day we noticed the water level getting higher as the tide came in. This was when we learned for our next day of data collection, checking the tide was a must. Besides those few tweaks everything went smoothly out at the beach and should go even better the next time we go out.