Physical Fieldwork

Question 1

What was the physical enquiry title?

Answer 1

Investigate changes to characteristics of sand dunes in Studland Bay.

Question 2

What was the physical enquiry hypothesis?

Answer 2

there is significant change to the shape and vegetation on the sand dunes in knoll beach.

Question 3

Where was the physical enquiry held and what was the justification for it?

Answer 3

• Knoll beach has a deep and mature dune system that allowed for 200m transects. This helped us prove our hypothesis.
• The national trust allowed us to access it for free. This also meant we could measure how human intervention changes the dunes.
• It was easy to access by a 15 minute coach drive.

Question 4

What was the risk assessment of the physical enquiry?

Answer 4

The risk of:
- tick/ snake bites was mitigated by not wearing shorts, the teachers carried tick gear and a hospital that has experience with snake bites was in a 15 minute radius.
- slips, trips and falls was mitigated by having to wear suitable footwear and students were told to watch their footing especially in the steeper areas.

Question 5

What were the key theories behind our physical investigation?

Answer 5

• Succession theory describes the evolution of a dune system from the marram grass and other pioneer species growing on embryo and fore dunes.
• The Cyril Driver Project encourages visitors to trample on overly dominant species like heather to allow for more biodiversity.
• plant adaptations: dune plants have evolved to grow in areas of high wind speeds, extreme temperatures, low pH levels and lack of water content.
  ~ mobile dunes tend to have species like marram grass with thick waxy leaves and strong roots
  ~ the fixed dunes’ heather and gorse tend to grow further back because they need the extra shelter from the wind and have to have the more acidic and nutrient rich soil.

Question 6

How did we present our sand dune shape data and how effective was this?

Answer 6

• presented the sand dune profile as a transect graph to show the dune shape. This was very effective as we had a clear visual representation of the dune system and number of dunes. It was to scale which increased accuracy.
  ~however, plotting the data required a lot of precision and therefore there was a huge risk of human error which decreased the precision.
  ~ to improve we should have added small photos and stuck them to the corresponding dunes/ slacks which would have made it easier to tell apart the different dunes.
  —We used a protractor and a ruler to do this.

Question 7

How did we present our vegetation and pH data and how effective was this?

Answer 7

• the overlay of vegetation and pH data above the transect helped us to associate the data sets e.g. marram grass dominated the first ridge and from this we concluded that the fore dune was there.
• we wrote the percentage of vegetation in the appropriate sections in the graph which isn’t very visual compared to the transect and to improve this, we should have made mini pie charts.

Question 8

How was the data actually collected for the dune transect physical enquiry?

Answer 8

• using systematic sampling of a sample size of 40 data points, we collected the gradient of the dunes at 5 metre intervals using ranging poles, a 50m tape measure and a clinometer.
  ~the clinometers however were quite old and had faulty hinges so we can’t be too sure that all the gradients are reliable and accurate.

Question 9

How was the data collected for the vegetation coverage and dominant species?

Answer 9

• we used quadrats and plant species identification sheets to assess the type of vegetation on each sample.
  ~ the quadrat was very effective at gaining a random sample to test the percentage of vegetation.
  ~ the identification sheet however was hard to read and it didn’t cover all the species that was there. E.g. we thought that all of the Cat Ear plants were just regular dandelions which suggests our conclusions aren’t fully valid.