Diurnal Mammal Population Countin Bluethenthal

DISCLAIMER: THIS IS PROBABLY UNCW's STUFF IN SOME WAY SHAPE OR FORM, AND ALTHOUGH IT IS TOTALLY NOT PUBLISHABLE, IT MIGHT BE USED FOR SOMETHING BY THESE QEP PEOPLE. I DON'T KNOW. I DON'T THINK THEY EVEN KNOW.

now that that is out of the way, pointless as it may be i still feel it is somewhat necessary. i don't know. anyways, here is the conclusion of my research. warning: it hasn't changed much from the other time i posted about it, this one is just a bit more detailed.

at the pond the whole time. at least it was pretty for my book reading totally scientific observation...

Observational Methods
in Bluethenthal for 1-3 hour sessions; and a few times did marathon 8 hour sessions. observed and recorded any wildlife seen, primarily focused on mammals. dominated by squirrels & bats. i definitely didn't just sit on a bench the whole time and read a book and make a tally mark everytime a squirrel showed up.

Fail Safes
had a few things in place to make sure that i didn't repeat any sightings of the same animal. i didn't record a squirrel sighting if i had seen a squirrel in the last 15 minutes. i did the same thing except for 10 minute intervals with the bats.

Graphs!

so, this was my results for the squirrel data. as you can see, they peaked in activity during dawn & dusk. these numbers are the averages for what i saw at each hour of the day.

these were for the bats, and obviously they were only active when it was semi-dark outside.

this was a complex graph i put together. on the top you see the high and low temps for each day on the x-axis. then on the bottom you see the number of recorded squirrels (green) and bats (blue). what this shows is the increased activity of squirrels over time as the temp is going down. this in theory would happen due to their instinct to forage and store for the winter as it gets colder. the yellow triangles are the phases of the moon, with the highest being a full moon (on oct 12th, i think it was). i was hoping to see activity decreased during the full moon, because of the heightened visibility for predators, but no such thing occured.

Expected
so the squirrels did about what you would expect, overall. the bats, i was just pleased to have enough data on bats to say anything about them. i was really disappointed that i didn't see anything else; no foxes, feral cats, raccoons, or anything else in terms of mammals.

Pitfalls
oh boy, were there any number of problems with just about everything:
-island geography
-small sample area, size, & timeframe
-changing fall temps
-rain
-lack of diurnal animals & no night data
-my laziness in the project
-external humans & dogs in the forest

Improvements
getting cameras for camera trapping data would be super awesome, but i wouldn't have gotten the cameras until like last week, when my research was already basically finished. also more people than me because i have no work ethic to help gather data. it would also be pretty cool to get some comparative data from other places on campus.

now i get to take all of this and put it into a poster! should be loads of fun there. :)