| MadSci Network: Botany |
Hi Jack, I'm a plant ecologist and I use transects to study plant populations for a number of reasons. A transect is a line that you lay out in the area that you are studying. Most importantly transects are a good way of getting a relatively unbiased sample of plants to study, if you just walked around an area picking plants to sample you might conciously or unconciously pick the biggest or the greenest or some other biased sample. If you lay out a transect and then choose the plant closest to a random number along that transect you get an unbiased sample. Transects are often used if plant ecologists want to see how a plant community changes over space. For example they are used to study how the vegetation changes from a pond edge outwards. Or they can be used to look at how vegetation changes from the edge of a glacier. So transects can be used to look at transitions in space. I've used a transect to sample how far away from parent trees you get seedlings, you get lots of seedlings close to the parents and they get less dense as you get further from the parents, for example the lines below represent the transect, the big X is the parent and the little x's are the seedlings. ------------------------------------------------------------------- Xxxxx xxx x xxx x xx xx x x xx x x x x Hope this helps, Yvonne Dr. Yvonne Buckley NERC Centre for Population Biology Imperial College London Ascot, Berkshire, SL5 7PY
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