Assignment: Field

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Assignment: Field#

Deadline

Friday, 22 March at 23:59

What’s due?#

  1. Report outlining both the experiment design, the diary of events as the experiment was carried out, and the conclusions following the experiment (*.pdf), and

  2. Gitlab repository (optional, recommended) containing folders such as

  • report/ - containing the editable Word, \LaTeX or markdown documents and final pdf

  • data/ - containing data tables or files from the experiment

  • code/ - with code to process the data,

  • figures/ - with figures generated by the code.

The report should be clear and understandable, and written in plain language. Your “reader” can be assumed to be fellow students. Any material from another source should be appropriately referenced. As a rough guideline, the report should be no longer than 10 pages plus figures and/or photos. You will be working in a group to carry out the work, so only one set of files is required.

The report should contain:

  • A statement of contributions by the authors (1 paragraph), i.e., “XYZ and ABC concep- tualised the experiment. ABC and GHI wrote the experiment design. XYZ and DEF carried out the experiment. KLM wrote the python scripts to make figures from the data. DEF, KLM and XYZ wrote the report. XYZ and DEF proofread the experiment design.”

  • It should include a sections such as:

    • Table of contents

    • Objectives - what is the objective/purpose/aim of the experiment?

    • Background - Necessary background on the location for the field experiment (expected natural processes and their timescales of variability).

    • Materials list - what equipment is needed?

    • Diary of events - a record of activities as they took place during the field excursion. This may be up to 2 pages of additional text either in a table (with timestamps as one column) or in a bullet list where each bullet starts with either a timestamp or the name of the activity (plus time stamp).

    • Results - describe the data using tables, figures and words. Also any calculations made from the data. Here you should also discuss errors and uncertainty due to measurement methods (the instrument accuracy) and temporal/spatial variability.

    • Conclusion - the conclusion should be supported by the data and data calculations

    • Outlook or Recommendations (optional) - Your report may additionally make recommendations for modifications of the experiment in the future. but you may rename these sections or repurpose them as long as the overall content remains.

The report will be assessed for completeness, readability and whether or not the experiment, results and conclusions are sensible.

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