Abundance and distribution

• What is abundance?


  how many organisms there are
• what is distribution?


  where the organisms are
• What is sampling?


  measuring a subset of the organism population, then use it to make predictions about the whole population
• What are the two types of sampling?

  -quadrats

  -transects
• What are quadrats?


  Quadrats are square frames, subdivided into smaller frames
• How do you use a quadrat?

  • Measure the width and length of a field
  • generate 10 pairs of random coordinates
  • place quadrat and count how many many dandelions are in each quadrat.
  • calculate the mean of dandelions in each quadrat
  • estimate the population size using the mean.