Common Tree Fern Proposal

 I'm not really feeling normal today. Perhaps I am just getting tired and stressed out about our research project. 

Not much to report today. Our first lecture of the day was on Soil Biodiversity. It was a review for me because it was a combination of soil science and soil microbiology classes I have taken this past year at A&M. Then Tom gave a lecture outside-nice change of view- on Biodiversity: who, what, where. It was mainly a discussion lecture about societal problems and conservation biology and how it is affecting our environment. The nice weather was cut short though because it started to rain :( so we all moved back inside. I was very surprised to find out that the Taiwanese birth rate is roughly 0.9.  The natural replacement and growth rate for a women is 2.1 and so just like Japan and Italy I think Taiwan's population will start declining. Some of the NTU students said it's because more of the women here are deciding not to have children because they want to provide the best possible education they can, and if they can't they do not want to have any children. Tom also gave us the fact that 9 billion people will be on this earth by 2050 to ponder about. I can't even imagine what 2 billion more people on this planet will mean for us. I'm quite worried actually and can't help but wonder what can we do.

Ahh at last Corinne presented our proposal. She did very good despite her nervousness. I told her and the rest of us did that she would be fine because we would be there to help her if she could not answer any questions. Anyways everything seemed all good because we spent all night trying to figure out what our hypothesis was going to be until one of the professors suggested to Anbo and Heng-An that we compare the natural vegetation and artificial vegetation areas and compare those tree ferns. We were all quite puzzled because how can we compare these two types of vegetation with so little time and how are these ferns different from one another besides the vegetation around it. We were asking ourselves what are we comparing. So as a result we decided to scope out our research area and did  see a drastic change in the landscape. Along the bird watching trail, there is more forest area compared to the plantation like area of artificial planting. This helped us alot to help us change our hypothesis but it is still very stressful because we will be counting alot of trees tomorrow and the bird watching trail is very steep.

I wish that we had so much more time because I really want to figure out what is causing all these tree ferns to die. It would be amazing if I could actually take some samples back so that we could analyze it but unfortunately it is not possible right now. Ahh it would be so interesting and I'm so flustered that I can not :?

I hope everyone is safe tomorrow as we all venture to collect our data :) I must pack now because tomorrow we are all moving to cottages somewhere along the experimental forest.