Planning your fieldwork
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This document provides guidance for investigating the hypothesis that Dawlish Warren coastal area is effectively managed. It instructs the reader to identify key questions, geographical concepts, and methods of data collection to test the hypothesis. The reader is asked to plan fieldwork methods, decide on systematic or random data collection approaches, identify collection locations, and consider how to present results visually through maps, graphs, photos and other formats.
Planning your fieldwork
- 1. Hypothesis: “Dawlish Warren is Managed Effectively” Use your mind map of an effective coastal management scheme to choose 3 key questions to investigate. The answers will help you prove the hypothesis true or false.
- 2. Identify 4/5 geographical concepts that will underpin your project • Processes in the formation and erosion of a spit • Visitor honeypot • Sustainable management • Coastal defences + advantages and problems / environmental impact • Species diversity • Coastal processes Longshore drift / deposition • Hard & Soft engineering strategies • Land use conflicts • Different habitats – beach / sand dunes / mudflats / saltmarsh
- 3. Plan a minimum of 4/5 methods. You must plan your OWN methods, create recording sheets and identify / make any recording equipment
- 4. How much data do you need to collect for it to be meaningful?
- 5. How will you collect data? Systematic? Stratified? Random? This will need deciding before you go!
- 6. Where will you collect data and why? Be able to make a map showing fieldwork locations
- 7. Time / date / weather can all be significant in data collection. Make sure to include them on recording sheets
- 8. Methods MUST be justified in terms of how they address the hypothesis/ key questions / concepts.
- 9. Finally, think about how you will present your results. Your methods MUST allow you to able to do several of these… • Maps • Well annotated photos and sketches • Data overlays • Graphs and Charts • Cross sections / Beach profiles • Proportional flow diagrams • Choropleth maps • Proportional symbols on maps • Scatter graphs