A scientist interested in exploring the relationship between

A scientist interested in exploring the relationship between species richness and land area collected the following data on number of terrestrial bird species on islands of the West Indies. What type of data (quantitative or qualitative) are represented in this table? what kind of graph would the scientist use to present these data What would be an appropriate statistical test to use to compare the relationship between number of bird species and island size? Compute this test. What is your conclusion about this relationship?

Solution

Answer:

a) The data presented in the above table is a quantitative data that presents the reationship between the land area and species richness in different islands of West Indies.

b) From the given data, we can calculate the species richness per area. That relationship shows the species richness density in different islands and by bar graph presentation we can analyze how species richness per area differs upon different islands.

c) A correlation analysis is useful when you want to see the linear relationship between two (or more) normally distributed interval variables. There is a correlation between species richness and area of land.

d)Conclusion: As the size of the island increases the species richness also increases. But the the species richness per area does not vary accordingly.

Island	Number of Land Bird Species	Land Area (Log10 Km-2)	Number of Species per Log10 Km-2 area
Hispaniola	69	4.884	14.12
Puerto Rico	50	3.949	12.66
St. Lucia	41	2.79	14.69
St. Vincent	36	2.59	13.89
St. Kitts	20	2.255	8.86
Saba	18	1.114	16.15
Anguilla	13	0.954	13.62