GEOG 442

Biogeography

Group Projects

Each student team will conduct an original research project that will contain the following elements:

• field or archival collection of data (may entail travel off campus)
• data entry in a spreadsheet or database
• organization and analysis of data
• integration of data analysis with a question or hypothesis taken from previous work and literature
• presentation of your work in a written report about 5-7 pages long (double-spaced, 10-12 point leading) plus references, tables, and figures
• presentation of your work to the class in a 10-15 minute talk, illustrated appropriately with viewgraphs (e.g., Impress, PowerPoint, Prezi) on May

Possible Projects

• Helping Dr. Rodrigue expand the Palos Verdes floristic key (https://cla.csulb.edu/departments/geography/PV/ by creating a database of species characteristics so she can complete the logic trees for the herbaceous life form
• Doing 20 m transects across the CSS-grassland ecotone with 1 m quadrat frames to census species present and ground coverage (I have a list of potential sites in the Palos Verdes Portuguese Bend preserve, Sepulveda Dam basin, and the Santa Monicas)e
• Identifying pioneer CSS species in grasslands in those sites.
• Doing Project Pigeon Watch counts and processing them for pigeon morph responses to habitat types and courting preferences.
• Or???

first placed on the web: 11/03/03
last revised: 02/12/13
© Dr. Christine M. Rodrigue