what the data looks like...

We are all extremely surprised that we have already completed week 3 of fieldwork here in Acadia! Time is flying by and the data is accumulating. I wanted to write a short post explaining what actual data we are trying to collect. We have had great groups of citizen scientists come to 3 of the four sites now, and we collect aquatic and terrestrial invertebrates  using a variety of methods. We try to sort them a little in the field, but mostly we bring them back to the lab (aka fieldhouse) and sort and count them. Right now, because we are trying to collect as much data while we are in Maine as possible, I don't want to spend all our time in the lab so we kind of do a rough sort into orders or families. We will look more carefully at these samples in the fall to further classify them, but for now, we are seeing lots of interesting diversity. Check out this photo of the diversity from the aquatic sampling at Marshall Brook: 

Aquatic invertebrates laid out to show differences in size among different families.

Our goal as the summer goes on is to understand how the insects are changing at each site, so we will create graphs that show the diversity and abundance at each site... below is the data in a graph. How is this going to change at our next sampling day? We don't know! That's science! Check out our results page, which has the current graphs and trends for each site. 
 https://www.acadiabugproject.com/2018-project-results.html

Allyson Jackson

Professor and maker of black bean burgers.