Shannon Diversity, Richness, and Evenness
Figure 3:Shannon Diversity, Richness, and Evenness Data
Method: Taken by extracting bacteria DNA from apple and peach soil and putting it into an EcoPlate following a two step serial dilution. Ecoplates are a culture independent method that measure the metabolism of our 31 carbon sources by conducting a community-level physiological profiling. Both solutions from condition 1 and condition 2 were diluted then pipetted into an EcoPlate. After a week long incubation, the EcoPlate was run through the plate reader. After scanning our EcoPlate, we used this data to calculate our Shannon diversity, richness, and evenness values. Carbon utilization was calculated by finding the change in absorbance of the different eco plate wells.
Legend: Average Richness, Evenness, Shannon Diversity index for apple and peach soil. Standard deviation and an unpaired t-test assuming unequal variance included. Bacteria DNA was extracted from apple and peach soil. The unpaired t-test value for Richness is 0.67 which is higher than 0.05. This shows that the data is not significant. The unpaired t-test value for Evenness is 0.20 which is higher than 0.05. This shows that the data is not significant. The unpaired t-test value for Shannon Diversity is 0.31 which is higher than 0.05 which shows that the data is not significantly different.
Data Analysis
Evidence:
The difference between richness of apple and peach soil is not statistically different because the p-value calculated by the t-test is 0.67 which is higher than 0.05. The difference of evenness between apple and peach soil is not statistically different because the p-value calculated by the t-test is 0.20 which is higher than 0.05. The Shannon diversity index is not statistically different between apple soil and peach soil because the t-test value of 0.32 is higher than 0.05. This is consistent with the above data in Figure 1 because pH can affect the bacteria in the soil and apple and peach soil have statistically similar pH (Dupont, 2018).
Conclusion:
Because the differences between our soil samples for condition one [apple] and condition two [peach] vary so little, we know that there is no unique data within our t-test or Shannon Diversity Index. We also know that the bacterial biodiversity within our samples is consistent to each other because our Shannon Diversity Indexes for condition one and two didn’t have a large difference and they were greater than 0.05. This means that the biodiversity is evenly spread through the soil of each, however their frequencies measure both samples to have a relatively low biodiversity due to their values being less than 1.0. The carbon utilization of both of our conditions were relative to each other because the carboxylic acids, amino acids, carbohydrates, polymers, and amines cycled through the same amount of carbon.
Condition had lower richness concentration than the peach tree. However, this data is moderate, as there is no significant change between the richness values of our conditions. Condition 1 had a richness average of 29.625, while condition 2 has an average value of 29.375. This means that there is only a 0.25 difference. Based on these calculations, we can confidently conclude that this data is not unique. We are also able to conclude that the biodiversity is evenly spread throughout the samples. There is a relatively low biodiversity in both condition 1 and condition 2. We were able to conclude this piece of information by performing a t-test and Shannon Diversity Index and analyzing both values.
Explanation:
The average richness, evenness, and Shannon diversity of peach tree soil and apple tree soil is not statistically different. This could be due to the apple and peach tree being near each other in the garden. The apple and peach trees were both towards the edge of the garden and closer to the road. The condition of the soil was similar from each condition. Soil biodiversity is linked to soil pH (Wu et al., 2017). Since soil pH for apple and peach soil is not statistically different this could be an explanation as to why the soil biodiversity is not significantly different between apple and peach soil.