Succession Lab Report

Succession Lab

INTRODUCTION:

The purpose of our lab was to begin to understand the rates of succession. Succession is a number of persons or things following one another in order or sequence. Considering that all living things follow some sort of order, Joey Collins, Brian Carman, Chris Broadwater, Marisa Grondin, and I attempted to figure the succession rates of two different forests. In order to do this we used the forest behind the elementary school and the forest behind the track, by the pond. One of my hypotheses was that the maple tree would be the most dominant tree in both forests especially in forest A, the elementary school. My reasoning for this was because I know how many maple trees I see in the forest by my house, and other forests around me. I
When we entered forest A, I looked around me and noticed a lot of familiar trees. Many of the leaves were wide and had points. When our group was finished in forest A, we had a total of fifty one maple trees. We went onto forest B and finished our measurements we had a total of forty-eight maple trees. Our next hypothesis was that the pond forest would be the older forest out of the two. When we first got to forest B, we noticed that the pond had a significantly larger amount of lower level vegetation. We figured the reasoning for this was because forest B received more sunlight to the forest floor. We also noticed that there were less dead trees and the live trees seemed to be smaller in circumference. The only problem was that the pond forest seemed to be less bothered than the one behind the elementary school. I didn’t make much sense of this. I figured if the forest was farther away, which it was indeed, it would be less disturbed and contain bigger trees. Therefore, I was a tad confused. Although, it did make sense to me that by receiving more sunlight, the forest would have more lower level