Gavà Dunes Field Study British School of Barcelona February 4 2020

Transect lines are laid across the unmanaged sand dune ecosystem as shown below. These allow for statistical analysis of changes in biotic and abiotic factors, vegetation succession and human or invasive species impacts. The Simpson's Diversity Index and Mann Whitney u test can be used to investigate changes in vegetation biodiversity along the transect and Spearman's Rank Correlation Coefficient may be used to test hypotheses (e.g. that vegetation diversity increases with distance inland).