Atlantic Forest
General Methadology for Instructors and TAs

Exercise 5: Similarity of Home Gardens
Module 5: Community Ecology: An Introduction to the Players and How to Measure Communities

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  1. Background Lecture:
    • Characteristics for describing communities
    • Methods for estimating beta diversity
    • Multivariate analysis (classification and ordination)
  2. Activities in the experiment:
    • Establish sampling plots
    • Collect data on diversity (species richness and types of species )in the plots
    • Calculate similarity coefficients
    • Run simple multivariate analysis (Cluster analysis)
  3. Hypotheses to test
  4. Independent variables in the experiment
  5. Dependent variables that they could use in their experimental design.
  6. Student evaluation
    • Based on presentation of results (written and oral)
  7. Preparation notes
    • Find field sites in MST areas with different types of crops