Just finished this activity with my 9th graders that are studying Marine Science. I was short on time due to setup time with one class (we share classrooms at my school), so they only collected transect point intercept data. The second class did quadrat data collection where we counted everything in the quadrat.
One of the things that was still unclear to me once students doing the quadrat data collection was layering. I told them that as long as they could see part of the "organism" they could count it, even if it was under something else, because otherwise we would have only counted the one closest to the "water" surface. Did anyone else sample this way?
My students really enjoyed the activity. I wish we had more time because 45 minutes to introduce the topic and collect data (they are going home to analyze and answer questions) is really short. I can't wait to actually take students out into the field next year to do this.
