Yay for summer! I mean, um...

For weeks, I've been battling one of the seven sins...sloth. It's almost difficult to bring myself back to work, especially with the nice weather we've been having the past few weeks. However, I've finally been able to pull myself slightly back into a working mode and am now going to present to you a portion of what my ESYS paper will be talking about.

A majority of the data I've gathered for my paper is based off of work that involves bird exclosures experimentation. In the data that I gathered, they were 3 types of shrubs: exclosures, shams, and control shrubs. Another variable of this experiment was whether or not the shrubs were surrounded by low or high grasses. To better illustrate, here is a picture of an A. californica bush that Lizzie did her experiment on at Sweetwater NWR:

This is a low-grass bird exclosure shrub. Cute!

From these shrubs, Lizzie collected samples from the shrub itself and vacuumed arthropods pre- and post-experimental period. These samples are what I have been working with for the past few months (albeit slowly), and although there has not been much analysis done on the data gathered, in terms of herbivory, there is not much difference between the different treatment types (previous blog post). As for the post-experimental period samples gathered, I have noticed while sorting the arthropods that some shrubs would have a high quantity in the vacuumed samples. I'm not sure if this is due to the amount of actual foliage that was vacuumed, as some sample bags had more (or less) in terms of volume, but there should be more information about this answered as soon I'm able to enter in all the data concerning the types of arthropods I've sorted.