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Purpose: Greater biodiversity is usually the mark of a strong environment. It is generally believed in the scientific world that man's influence upon the environment is a cause of loss of this diversity. The purpose of this week's experiment is to examine the diversity of four regions, the first being cultivated private property, the second semi-cultivated private property, the third wild lands and the last, construction 'wastelands'.

Hypothesis: Because man influences which plants occur on owned property, plant diversity is expected to go down as a function of the amount of time invested into cultivating the land. Based on this, it is hypothesized that the land with the most plant diversity be the wild lands.

Equipment: Needed for this experiment was pen and paper and open land to study.

Procedure: For each region, estimate a general rectangular section (each section in this experiment was 6 x 20 feet). Within each section count each plant (or note if uncountable) Compare the numbers of types of plants and the numbers of total plants in each area.

Observation:
Cultivated privated property Semi-cultivated private Property
Enumerous Bermuda Grass 
Enumerous Bur Clover 
Enumerous Crab Grass 
4 Dandelion 
2 Oxalis pes-caprae (sour grass) 
 		 22 Wild Mustard 
11 Cheeseweed 
11 Common Groundsel 
4  Wholly Blue Curls 
3 Yellow Sweet Clover 
2 Italian Thistle 
1 Red Stem Fillary 
1 Telegraph Weed 
and multiple "unidentified" grasses 
 
Wild Land Construction Wasteland
Enumerous Wild Oats 
11 Wild Radish 
11 Telegraph Weed 
6 Milkweed Thistle 
1 Wholly Lupin		 Enumerous Wild Barley 
10 Telegraph Weed 
8 Wild Mustard 
1 Wild Oats 
 

Conclusion: It seems apparent that, contrary to the hypothesis, the greater diversity belonged to the semi-cultivated land. A number of factors may account for this, including the possibility that the cultivated land may include more nutrients for "weed" like specied to infiltrated and most likely, the wild oats, probably strangled out the diversity of the wild lands.
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