An informal post of schooling excellence.

if you keep reading, i'll probably explain what this funky graph means

DISCLAIMER: this is unfinished, & unpublishable (and probably useless) work that i am doing for a larger UNCW project. it is my own work, and should not be used or re-purposed without both mine & UNCW's expressed consent.

this is the data i have collected from 9/27/11 through 10/10/11. now for some explanation!

so, for my Directed Independent Study for the school i am part of UNCW's Quality Enhancement Plan (specifically this one; be careful, it is a PDF). i am one of about a dozen students that are doing a variety of projects based around UNCW's natural resources, specifically in Bluethenthal Wildflower Preserve on campus.

this is a rough map of the Preserve that i am working in. all of my data is centered around the pond at the top of the map.

so, my project in particular is about making a mammal species count for the Preserve, and so far, all i've seen have been squirrels and bats - although i am bound and determined to see a fox that i have found evidence for! i have been out "collecting data" at all hours of the day, ranging from before sunrise to after sunset. it has taken me to this point to amass data for all hours of the day, and the graph above is the culmination of my work thus far.

all of this is being done around a lovely pond. i am standing on one side, so you can see that it is not a very large body of water.

the blue dots are my counts for squirrels at differing hours of the day (the x-axis covers a 24 hour period & obviously i have no night data since it is, you know, dark) the corresponding blue line shows the relative amounts of squirrels seen at the different times of the day via polynomial regression. it shows that the squirrels are most active in the morning hours, and the twilight hours (the two peaks).


the red dots are my counts for bats. this one is a bit trickier to do, considering you can't always see them, and therefore the numbers could be considerably higher. I have gotten a good enough look at two different bats flying by, and they were in the genus Myotis, but i cannot be specific for species. i have assumed that the other bats that i have heard were the same genus. the majority of my identifcation for the bats has been audio; you can hear bats squeaking, and if you listen carefully enough you can tell where these noises are coming from, and obviously when they overlap one another, you know there has to be more than one bat there. the orange polynomial line shows the predictable trend of there being bats only active around sunrise & sunset (roughly 7:00-7:15am and 6:50-7:05pm right now)

just another photo of the pond. really alleviates the stuffy boredom of doing research when you're around something so pretty.

so, the hope is to gather more data to have a more fleshed out and accurate regression line for the different animals. Also, i would like to find some different mammals! because i haven't seen anything other than these two species, i am working on a new theory of the over urbanization of UNCW and that being the cause of my lack of seeing any other mammals (such as opossums, or raccoons, or foxes) but hopefully i will be able to delve out that theory in the coming weeks! hopefully more to come about this at a later date. :)