Noguosadia Egharevba
10/30/19
Prof. Rodwell
Lab Report Analysis
Lab reports are an invaluable aspect of the process of scientific discovery. They can obviously relay the findings of a particular experiment or study to other in that field but also, they can explain these results to other people outside of science to stay keep those outside of the scientific community informed as well. After reviewing three lab reports, the first being “Habitat Availability Explains Variation in Climate-Driven Range Shifts Across Multiple Taxonomic groups” a report on a study that attempted to see if climate change explains the change in movement pattern of different species of animals, the second being “Seasonality of Climatic Drivers of flood Variability in the Conterminous United States” which is a report on a study that seeks to uncover how climate change affects the intensity of floods in the United States and the third being “Biotic and Climatic Velocity Identify Contrasting Areas of Vulnerability to Climate Change” a study on how climate change affects the movement of different species, it is apparent that Lab Report 3 fits the purpose of a lab report the closest due to it taking the time to define more technical terms and its attempt to simplify the findings of its respective study so that readers both in the scientific community and lay people can understand the results of the study and the implications of those results.
Lab reports are often fairly lengthy and thus need a section that can give the reader an idea of the contents of the report before they dive into them fully. This section is the abstract and all three labs contain competent abstracts with Lab Report 1 and 2 having equally good abstracts and Lab Report 3’s abstract being of a higher quality that the first two. All had all the necessary details of their respective lab reports. The authors of these reports were all able to detail the relevance of the subject, the scope of the experiment (number of species involved, region studied, etc..) and were able to describe the methods used to carry out the experiments. However, there was one issue that Lab Report 1 and Lab Report 2 had that hindered the quality of their abstracts. That issue was their use of technical terms that they did not define. This makes the abstract harder to understand for people who don’t already know what things like “range” and “range shifting” mean in this particular context. Even if they are defined later in the lab report it shouldn’t be the case that they aren’t explained in the abstract which is supposed to be the introduction to the report. Lab Report 3’s abstract actually defined the technical terms it used, this allowed me to better understand the lab before reading the rest of the report.
The introductions for the labs are similar in quality, however, Lab Report 3’s introduction is the better of the three. Lab Report 1 gives further context to its experiment on habitat availability by including the results of previous studies and even goes on to explain the flaws in the methodology of those experiments in order to give the reader greater understanding of the difficulty of studying range shifts. It also defines habitat in a detailed way, which allows the reader to better understand the study. Finally, the introduction of Lab Report 1 explains the scope of the study which is done in greater detail than the abstract. Lab Report 2 is similar in its introduction, it offers a more detailed background on its study of climatic drivers and their effect on flood variability and discusses the previous studies on the topic and their results. The introduction to Lab Report 3 is shorter but manages to cover the same things as Lab Report 1 and 2 but also includes graphs associated with the previous studies which helps the reader to understand their results and how they relate to its study of how climate change affects biotic and climatic velocity. The brevity of Lab Report 3’s introduction is what makes it the best of the three since it keeps the reader from losing interest, while also explaining things more effectively than the first two labs with its use of graphs.
All three lab reports extensively detail their methods and procedures. Lab Report 1 mentions the region in which the study was conducted (British mainland) as well as the years in which the study’s data comes from (1976 – 1990). It goes on to talk about the species included in the study and why they were selected to be a part of the study. Lab Report 1 also featured the exact equations used to make the climate estimates that it uses to find its results. Lab Report 2 also featured detailed explanations of the methods used and the databases where any relevant information outside of the lab was obtained such as the “U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) National Water Inventory System (NWIS, waterdata.usgs.gov) database”.
Similarly, all three lab reports were able to properly summarize their findings and discuss the implications of those findings with great detail. Lab Report 1 explains each part of its results in detail. First, it details the expansion of range shifts in the area that the study covers and how they are larger than in other parts of the world. It then goes on to talk about the second part of its results which involve habitat specialization and how it affects the change in range shits mentioned before. Finally, it explains how all of this ties into climate change by explaining how certain species are sensitive to climate. Lab Report 1 also includes figures which help the reader understand the findings in greater detail. Lab Report 2 is similar, though it does not dedicate a specific section to its results. It features a multi-layered breakdown of the findings on climate change and its relationship to flooding. It goes on to explain how the results, that “variations in flood magnitude are attributed to seasonal global scale climate drivers”(Dickenson, 2019 p.1), should be interpreted in relation to other studies on climate variability and flooding. Lab Report 3 features an explanation of the results of the study it covers in as much detail as the other two lab reports but it is superior to them in its discussion of its results by simplifying them to a point where readers can have a better understanding of what they are and how they relate to the context of the study. It does so by explaining that ‘Biotic responses to climate change can be conceptualized as having three axes: space, time and ecology” (Caroll, 2015, p.1) . This framing of the results allows the reader to better visualise the ways that organisms respond to climate change. This attempt to put its results into more simple terms makes Lab Report 3’s discussion of its results the most effective.
While these lab reports were all fairly even in quality, it is clear that Lab Report 3 is superior in quality to the other two. Its ability to simplify the findings of the study makes it more in line with the purpose of a lab report: to explain a lab and its findings to a particular audience. This does not mean that the other two lab reports are not impossible to understand by any means. They contain detailed explanations that went over every aspect of their respective studies in meticulous detail. However, these explanations were full of technical language that they did not bother to define, meaning that people who aren’t familiar with those terms could not properly understand a large amount of what those reports. Lab Report 3’s commitment to simplifying its results and defining the more technical terms it used is, in the end what made it the superior lab report.
Works Cited
Lab 1:Platts, P.J., Mason, S.C., Palmer, G. et al. Habitat availability explains variation in climate-driven range shifts across multiple taxonomic groups. Sci Rep 9, 15039 (2019) doi:10.1038/s41598-019-51582-2
Lab 2:Dickinson, J.E., Harden, T.M. & McCabe, G.J. Seasonality of climatic drivers of flood variability in the conterminous United States. Sci Rep 9, 15321 (2019) doi:10.1038/s41598-019-51722-8
Lab 3: Caroll, Lawler, Hamonn, Roberts Biotic and Climatic Velocity Identify Contrasting Areas of Vulnerability to Climate Change PLOS ONE (2019)
