Analyzing and Drawing Conclusions

UREAP Final Report – Summer 2025
Over the summer I studied mountain chickadees. The majority of my research report, however, came from method development for my upcoming honours project: I used parrot fecal samples to develop the fecal analysis methods I would use for analyzing the mountain chickadee feces I collected over the summer. This project taught me a lot about how to put together all the work I was doing over the summer into one cohesive report.

Methods:
Pages 7 to 10.
Here I discuss the mountain chickadee nest monitoring, data collection and parrot fecal sample analysis procedure.

Results:
Pages 11 to 12
There were limited results obtained from the parrot fecal analysis. Much of the results focused on mountain chickadee nest activity, fecal sample collection and the environmental data we collected like ambient sound.

Discussion:
Pages 13 to 14
Here I explain how the research I did over the summer will be critical for understanding Mountain Chickadee behaviour and stress physiology for my Honours research studying mountain chickadee stress by analyzing their feces.

Cell Physiology Research Project (BIOL 3520) – Winter 2025
This was a collaborative project I completed with fellow classmates in Cell Physiology. Through this research I learned how to interpret findings and use graphs and figures to present my data.

How I contributed to the project:

• I helped formulate our hypotheses and predictions and was involved in the methods (specifically, I took imaging of the scratch wound cell migration and helped with the caffeine solution/well preparation).
• I was involved in creating the figure and tables. Specifically, Figure 2 (the images of scratch recovery at different time periods), table 1 (average percent healing and velocity of cell migration) and Figure 3 (cell migration velocity graph from the different treatments).
• I was heavily involved in summarizing and interpreting our key findings from the project in the discussion. Primarily, I explained how our findings contradict other findings in the literature and I further discussed what possible confounding variables in our methods were.

Biometrics Campus Engagement Research Project (BIOL 3000) – Winter 2023
I surveyed over 300 students from TRU and summarized the results in a cohesive paper. We found that students are more engaged than we expected and used graphs and figures to support our claims.

How I contributed to the project:

• I came up with the research question and study.
• I formulated the hypotheses and predictions alongside my research partner.
• I organized the survey and methods.
• I surveyed all 300 students.
• I created all the figures in the results section using RStudio.
• I wrote the discussion and identified the key findings from our study.

Introduction to Animal Behavior Guppy Behaviour Study (BIOL 2290) – Fall 2024
My lab mates and I created a study where we analyzed female mating preferences in the guppy fish. This project was challenging because we did not find statistically significant results after collecting and analyzing our data. Our predictions aligned with what we found in the literature: female guppies will spend the majority of their time with the bright orange male guppies. Although we found the females generally spent more time with the orange males, the results were not statistically significant.

• I and my group mates came up with the study, hypotheses and predictions together.
• Together we conducted the study.
• I created the box plots (Figure 4 and Figure 5)
• I wrote the introduction and discussion.