Ideally, you’ll be able to find some way to make a meter squared box, but if you can’t your quadrat can be smaller. As long as the size of your quadrat is consistent each time you use it, the experiment will work. Be sure to take a picture of your home-made quadrat.  We’ll be using it for the discussion this week.
We’ll be using the transect method like the second technique shown in the video. This allows us to first determine the transect line that we would like to follow and use the quadrat to sample an equal amount of space at each predetermined point. That means that once you get to your habitat, you’ll choose where on the edge to start and you’ll aim toward the center of the area as you go.
Once you find a good spot, set down your quadrat to take your first data collection. To conduct the sampling within your quadrat, simply count the number of individuals of each species. You’ll need to keep track of what species are present and how many of each there are, so you’ll need to make a data table . Before you start, you’ll need to decide how to deal with plants that are partly in and partly out of the quadrat. One possibility is to include plants that are more than half in and exclude ones less than half in. Another is to include all the border plants on the north and east sides and exclude all of those on the south and west sides.