Blood in the water…

In prepping grad students for their first big talk at a scientific meeting I always tell them everything will be fine – until the first data slide hits the screen.  The audience will nod knowingly during the introductory comments and even during the materials and methods, but data charts and tables are to scientists what chum is to hungry sharks.  So clearly I should have known better than to post figures without error bars in last week’s post.  In my defense, SigmaPlot, my program of choice for scientific graphing, currently resides on my old laptop which is running slower than molasses, so I did the ‘quick and dirty’ and used PowerPoint on my desktop.  Yes, my mother did raise me better than the present a measure of central tendency without an indication of dispersion.

So, duly chastised and humbled, I present the latest (July 12) volumetric soil moisture values from the SoMeDedTREEs.  N=8 for all means *=means are different at p=0.05.  The table below is more complete than last week’s post, which only presented the means from measurements just outside the container root ball.

Mean (std err) volumetric soil moisture of planetrees at MSU Hort farm, with and without 3” of ground red pine mulch