Mission three

Background

When people move into an area they initially transform the landscape into something that is more suitable to meet their needs. The landscape is modified with elements of a "transported landscape" from elsewhere (often from where people have come from) to create a more pleasing or effective place in which to live. As different people move into the same environment, changes are made to earlier landscapes and a layering effect may be seen. Managed landscapes are therefore historical records of present and past managers and their passive and active decisions and plant/animal partners.

Humans and other members of these landscapes have "home ranges" or territories in which they function within certain normal scales of time. These are areas where they actually do things rather than zones of potential activity. Home ranges represent areas where plants and animals can be found that have interactions with humans and therefore are the direct subject of ethnobiological inquiry.

The focus of this mission will be on three communities that are all near to and living in the same watershed as the National Tropical Botanical Garden (NTBG), Allerton Garden, Lawai, Kaua`i. The three selected communities are probably different socio-economically and they are varying distances from the NTBG garden. There is reason to believe that the people within these communities may see the NTBG garden as being part of (or not) their "home ranges" because of a variety of reasons and it would be interesting to know if this is the case.

Assignment

Students work in subteams of 2 (or 3) as part of a single large group project. All data learned from the day will be pooled and each student will submit a report analyzing the data themselves (not in teams of 2 or 3). It is expected that a certain level of leadership, professionalism, and cooperation will emerge in order for this project to be completed.

In general the methods outlined in McClatchey et al. (2008) will be followed. Steps specifically skipped will be the community participation steps. The research group (all of the teams of students) will be expected to develop one or more shared hypotheses about home ranges or transported landscapes of the communities that share the valley with the NTBG garden and possibly how these communities may articulate knowledge with the garden (to or from the garden).

The communities should be sampled randomly. An attempt should be made to collect a significant sample size from each of the three proposed communities.

Analysis of the data should include an evaluation of within and between community differences as well as overall trends or statistics generated as part of the hypotheses being tested.

A typed report will need to be submitted on each student's web site on the same day as the assignment. Submit an e-mail message to the instructors indicating the specific subaddress of the final report (this will serve as the act of submission and function as a date/time stamp).

The report should include the following parts:

Past science: (do not include the term past science within the outline of the site. this is included for organizational benefit.)

1. Introduction (discuss why the problem is important, possibly citing other researchers who have conducted similar studies and cite literature about the methods that will be used but do not discuss how you actually used the methods)

Present science: (do not include the term present science within the outline of the site. this is included for organizational benefit.)

2. Hypotheses (Clearly state only the hypotheses that were actually used.)

3. Materials and Methods (discuss the methods used and the equipment used to get the work done. only cite literature as a short-hand way to skip long discussions about methods when you have followed a method almost exactly as it has been done in the literature. When you have modified a method from the literature, then discuss it in the introduction and present your version here.)

4. Results (be specific and don't mess around with discussing the results. This may just be a few sentences that point to tables or graphs.)

5. Discussion (discuss the results as you interpret them. If you need other literature to help interpret them the write about that literature in the introduction and refer back to it here but don't cite it. Be sure to evaluate the hypotheses as "supported" or "unsupported" and remember that in science hypotheses are not usually "proven.")

Future science: (do not include the term future science within the outline of the site. this is included for organizational benefit.)

6. Conclusions (discuss the application of this experiment in a more general way for understanding human interactions with plants or environments. What theory or hypothesis would you now develop about how people around the world might interact with landscapes or botanical gardens, etc.?)

7. Literature cited: (list literature cited in alphabetical order by author last name. List complete citations rather than abbreviations for journals, etc.)