Mammalogy Diversity Paper (untitled)

Abstract

Throughout the course of the summer session, the mammalogy class set traps in two types of locations, both of which were unrelated in habitat and topography styles. The two different types of locations were in prairie and in forest communities. These traps were checked often to monitor common trends in diversity themes in each location. The traps were set in a variety of forest types including deciduous and coniferous, as well as more dry and more wet areas. The class also set traps in varied locations including prairies with both wet and dry plots. When initially observing the data of the different communities of both the forest and the prairie, my assumption was that the forest would have a larger diversity of species due to the cover that is provided and the different types of food that I would thought would be more readily available in that environment. After examining and comparing the data that we collected in both the prairie and forest locations, the community with the larger number of species that we collected was the prairie. In the prairie community, we collected a total of eight different species. In comparison, we collected a total of six different species in the forest community. Although the prairie community had a larger species diversity, the forest locations produced 35 more total animals.