During the first week of school Dr. Brokaw taught me how to use the computer program that I will need to do the Detrended Correspondence Analysis (DCA) of our Tallgrass Prairie vegetation plots. The program is called Canoco. It is not the kind of program you could just use common sense to muddle through, and I am sure that knowing how to use it will be useful in the future. I completed my first analysis on my own later in the week, but I need to have my work checked before I am confident that I got everything done correctly. I have included an example DCA from last year. We use DCA to show how similar the vegetation types on each of our plots are; sites that are similar will be close together on the DCA diagram.
Detrended Correspondence Analysis From 2011 Vegetation Data. Red squares represent species composition of spill site quadrats. Green circles represent tilled control quadrats. Blue triangles represent native preserve sites.
Dr. Brokaw, Emily and I met to go over what we expect from this year and a time frame for accomplishing our goals……all dependent on the GCMS (gas chromatography–mass spectrometry) working properly. Last year the GCMS was continually either broken or being used, and we failed to gather much data because of that set back. We were crossing our fingers that this year would not be the same but we are already off to a bad start.
Emily went to go run a sample from last year just to be sure that we could get results using the GCMS before I take off on running all the samples through the cyclohexane to avoid wasting our resources. Unfortunately, the GCMS is out of helium…..again….which means that we are already behind schedule. [Editorial note from Dr. Brokaw: But hey, no one is complaining here!]
Our plan called for some wiggle room so I hope we can get on track soon.