This goal is about  analyzing and applying the major principles of ecology and evolution. I believe that in my time here at Longwood. I have achieved this in two specific classes. In BIOL 250 was where ecology and evolution first started for me. I learned all sorts of things like predator and prey interactions, food chain energy transfer, natural selections, and evolution vs creationism. However, one topic that really stayed on my mind was diversity of certain landscapes. I was so intrigued that I did a project on it. We made a project to see the difference in biodiversity between forests and grassland. 25 pitfall traps were step in both forest and grasslands. The group would go to buffalo creek and check how much biodiversity was in each cup and record the cloud coverage, precipitation, and humidity of that day. This went on for around three weeks until we got all our specimens. We had all our data on our notebooks then transferred them to excel. This was actually really interesting to learn because our results showed that there was more biodiversity on forest land than there was in grassland. This is how I applied this major principles early on. This then continued when I decided to take BIOL 341. This went even more in depth about ecology since it was a 300 level ecology class. This is where Dr. Fortino introduced a new concept called fragments. These fragments are when big plots of land are broken into different pieces. This causes the biodiversity to decrease. My groupmate and I wanted to expand on this and did an experiment where we would see if distance from the fragments would cause a different amount of biodiversity. This is how I was able to apply the major principles of ecology and evolution. Although I was never a big fan of the ecology and evolution side of biology. I have much appreciation and I will continue to have the same appreciation for it. I would definitely like to know how much more distance would it take for a fragment to have no affect on the biodiversity.

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1KtdVsT8VJYbYf8gDKrpwT-DtG2ErxkIrz77oHj2NFnU/edit#slide=id.p1

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1FBCTjajxrhmLQShyikjcIU6n6vqJNJtx/edit#slide=id.p1