Due Tuesday, September 6 at the beginning of class. The prospectus must be printed, and should be between 1 and 4 pages long (the shorter the better, as long as the description is complete). Please submit via blackboard.
Describe your proposed class project. Include a title, a brief justification of why the research is relevant or interesting, and the motivating questions. Also briefly describe your data set, including the methods, the kinds of organisms, the number of samples and species (at least approximately), the average number of species per sample (again, a guess is OK), the nature of your external environmental variables, and any other kinds of extra information you might be interested in analyzing. You do not need to include analytical methods, as those will be covered in this class.
Please let me know if you have problems with missing data, and/or empty samples.
Unless you have already written up the methods for another purpose, you do not need to give me a detailed methods section. Of course, you will eventually need to write one for the class project.
If you are co-authoring this paper with other members of the class, please hand in only one prospectus. If you are working on somebody else's data, please give an indication that you have received permission.
Citations of the literature are welcome but not required at this point. The key purpose of this exercise is so that I know you have a suitable data set for the class, and that you have thought of the key questions you hope the data will address.
I encourage you to make every effort to get the prospectus in early. The sooner you have an idea finalized, the more time you have to work on the project, and the more freedom you have to explore and work out the bugs.