This past week the vegetation group compiled and analyzed the data that we had previously collected. There were a few thing that I found were interesting. One of them was that as the distance from the shoreline increased the vegetation height decreased. I would have expected that it would have been the other way around. I thought that as the stressors from the shoreline decreased that the vegetation would become more prolific. Some reasons for this could be that the majority of these plants are below ground or that they are not stress resistant enough to grow large in that environment but are strong enough to over power the more stress resistant plants like Spartina alterniflora. Another thing that we found was that there was no significant difference in the shoreline retreat rate between the sites behind the reef and on the other sides of the reef. These are just a few of the things that I have learned from the research in this class.
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