The Size and Shape of Trees 2C

I worked on this lab with the lovely Krystaal and we went out and measured the circumference, trunk diameter, angle of inclination, length of basseline, and distance to baseline, which once all calculated together gave us the tree height of the measured individual. The lab instructed us to pick a taxa so we picked Palms which are prevalent on campus in a variety of shapes and sizes.

Above are our representations of our data (table and graph).

1. As our graph shows there is a linear correlation between the diameter of the trunk and the height of the tree. Though one can see that some points are very far from the line of best fit. This may be because of the wide variety of palms found on campus. We measured the very tall Royal Palms in Palm Court (which may be our outliers) as well as the shorter palms which we expect to be Bismarck Palms (though we don't really know neither one of us are Palm taxa experts). In retrospect it would've been useful to study up on the palms found on campus before going out as well as taking note of the species we sample so that we would be able to identify our outliers.

2. I see a trend in our palm trees similar to the proportions for legs of heavy animals (as seen in Figure 2.6 of Elements of Ecology by Smith and Smith 7th ed.). However, I did not see this trend in all our palm samples probably because we measure a variety of palms.

3. To determine the volume of the tree trunk one would take the radius squared, multiplied by the height. The cross sectional area can be calculated by squaring the radius and multiplying it by pi.

4. The definition of tangent is "the ratio of the opposite to the adjacent side of a right angle triangle"*. This was used because we did not know the height of the trees (what we were trying to find out) for sine and cosine it is imperative to already know the height of the tree. If we already knew the height of the tree we wouldn't need to do any calculations.

5. Living in Florida I expect most of our palm trees to be effected by our extreme weather, in particular hurricanes. Krystaal pointed out the curvy-ness of the palms which would also be indicative of high winds from storms. I also expect that, at least for the palms in Palm court, living in a small square must effect your growth at some point. This could effect our results since our trees were not straight, thus putting their height above their actual height.









*Definition From Princeton Word Reference