Southwest county park

My written habitat assessment of the park is as follows. The whole park sits on a Hill. My elevation at testing spot was 260ft. The is both a road directly south east of the spot and a river in valley just past the road. The floor of the park is primarily dirt and debris with no rocks. There is an abundance of downed branches, dead trees, and logs that can act as homes for animals or other plants to grow on. The types of vegetation around that dominate the area are evergreens, shrubbery, and ferns; there are a couple deciduous trees but hardly any in comparison to the evergreens. There are not many invasive species around that I could see. The trees and ferns cause a lot of shade and falling debris, such and needles and branches, covers the ground leaving little to no area for foreign species to grow and thrive.

For my research I've decided to pick the Polystichum munitum or the sword fern and the location of where i began my observations looks like this.

Here is my laughable version of a map compared to the park map

This is what I observed in my trials

1. 3 larger ferns about a foot of space between roots

2. 2 large ferns about a foot of space between roots

3. 1 very large fern, nothing growing under it

4. path, couple of dead leaves form nearby deciduous tree.

5. completely filled with huckleberry, another type of shrub (deciduous,light and toothed)

6. all huckleberry with some type of vine laying across

7. 2 fern plants about a foot apart from roots

8. just a small amount of huckleberry. A lot of twigs from tree next to square. 1 fern.

9. square in middle of path. Evergreen tree seed pods on path with needles. Dead huckleberry leaves

10. mostly path, dying fern no huckleberry couple twigs from tree

11. dead center path, 2 tree roots, looks like 12 old dead huckleberry leaves

12. some kind of bush with very small leaves (size of olives). Vines growing on bush

Because of these observation it has given me insight into a few things... On average there are about 2 ferns per quadrat. In the beginning of my transect they were always there but further down they began to become less present. I personally believe this transect is not a good representation of the site because when I finished and looked around there were more ferns than it would have implied. The biggest challenge for me during my sampling was the think vegetation; I was forced to either walk into the vegetation or throw my quadrat to get a gauge of the population inside it. The ferns were clumped together but always seemed to have at least a foot of space between their roots. The thing that surprised me is its not very effective in my opinion. I had thought it would be a simple matter but it turned out to be quite difficult and time consuming. As a result of it being a difficult method I think it would be a pore method to asses endangered species.