I made a study on the effect of two factors (A & B) on a variable response Y (chlorophyll rate) in mesocosms. These treatments with two modalities (A1/A2 & B1/B2) were crossed to create four different treatments : A1_B1 / A2_B1 / A2_B1 / A2_B2.
And i made 3 replicates per treatment.
However the chlorophyll rate varied according others factors especially zooplankton communities.
Thus, i obtained a huge variability between each 3 replicates per treatment. And to reduce it, i was wondering if i could divided my chlorophyll rate by the total amount of zooplankton / or the amount of cladocerans because these are the communities that contribute most to the decrease in chlorophyll. (Or even just divided by the amount of daphnia because they were the more abundant cladocerans present in my study over the time). My idea is to reduce the variation of zooplankton communities between replicates and thus to reduce variability of chlorophyll per treatment to then be able to see the effect of my treatments on chlorophyll ?
I hope I am not too confused and thank you in advance for your help.
You don't say how you are measuring chlorophyll which I think would be the first question or if you have some form of control mesocosm. So first approach would be to deal with variable in measurement which could depend on algae sp present, chlorophyll extraction method etc
I used a multiparametrics probe to get the cholorophyll rate (µg/L) and and i also made water samples to analyse them with a spectrofluorometric probe (e.g. BBE Algae Torch) and obtained the rate of different algae present. But i especially get green algae in hight quantity.
I not so familiar with the probes used although I have used them but I might suggest developing some calibration plots using standard wet chemistry extractions with acetone or even the hot methanol extraction.
- Badges
- Science method
- Similar topics
- Biological Science
- Ecology