Upon collecting data from 24 trees, we found that small trees in urban areas were colonized most by tardigrades. This was opposite of our hypothesis, which claimed that large, rural trees would be colonized most. It is unclear why this result was achieved however, it is possible that on urban trees there are less microbiota for tardigrades to compete with. Because tardigrades can survive in harsher conditions than nematodes and rotifers, it is probable that other microbiota did not survived the harsh conditions, leaving tardigrades with more resources in urban areas than rural. Our Chi Square goodness of fit test demonstrated strong findings to confirm that there was more colonization on small trees than large trees(X²=42.08; p<.0001). More testing could be done to determine why small trees colonized more than large trees and to confirm the new hypothesis about urban tree colonization. Overall, the results of our experiment showed that urbanization has no effect on tardigrade colonization.

^{Figure 1. Graphical comparison of tardigrade abundance in samples taken from Urban and Rural locations. The green bar represents small (diameter<1ft) trees while the yellow bar represents large (diameter>1ft) trees}