Biology Question

Question

My question

You shall perform a demographic study of a local population of the Norwegian mountain plant Ranunculus glacialis L. to ascertain whether the population size is stable, increasing or decreasing. The study will last five years.

a) What demographic data will you collect, and how often?

b) How will you mark the individuals?

c) Determine how many stages you will divide the life cycle of this plant into, draw a life cycle graph with transitions,and put these into a transition matrix.

Answer 1

Hi Gareth M.,

I'll assume that you have some general background in what demographic data denotes, and what are your options in how to note individuals in the landscape. Now let's get into specifics on your sampling procedure. 1) You should be aware that this, being an alpine species, indexes its flowering to the local snowmelt time. Obviously, this can vary greatly across your local terrain. How are you going to take this into account, assuming you're going to only do one censusing/year? 2) Are you expected to take prospective fertility data, e.g. seed:ovule ratios?