Puutaheinää

I am working with a new set of data analysis. The overall theme is something like "Does reindeer grazing (look for example this photo) have an impact on voles?". Reindeer do change the vegetation, that is quite obvious. What does that mean to the other animals who also eat plants?? Can they still keep eating the food they like or do they need to change their food habits???

So, we have collected a bunch of vole stomachs (no, there is no photo on the blog on that...) and counted how much plants are on those places where we trapped the voles (happens about like this).

So, I am comparing vole stomach contents to the vegetation where they were trapped. I got weird results (voles eat more willows when there is more grasses to eat) but came up with a good story; "In places with a lot of big grass (heinä) tussocks (like this) willows (paju = puu) are hiding from reindeer inside the tussocks. So they are less eaten and have less all kind of anti-herbivore toxines". If only... for a week I have managed to analyze data where voles were matched with a totally wrong vegetation data. So willows had finally nothing to do with grasses :( Aika puutaheinää koko analyysini....

But... I guess one thing to learn from PhD-studies would be to do things properly... starting the analysis over again!!!