RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

1.) Based on the data listed in Table 1, create the most appropriate graph to show the trends in
water temperature changes in Lake Taal during the given time period.

Figure 1. Graph showing the trend in monthly surface water temperature changes in Lake Taal

To show the water temperature changes in lake Taal in every month, a line graph was
constructed because the line graph is best used to track small changes in a data over a short or
long period of time. The year 2000 and 2009 was used to show the changes of the surface water
temperature for the period of time, another reason is that in the year 2000 and 2009, only one
data was missing so it was the appropriate data to use to compare the mean monthly surface
water temperature.
Figure 2. Monthly Surface Water Temperature of Lake Taal from 2000-2011

Figure 3. Annual Surface Water Temperature of Lake Taal from 2000-2011

To see any possible difference between the monthly surface water temperature and annual
surface water temperature, a one-way ANOVA is to be used for both the monthly surface water
temperature and annual surface water temperature. According to McDonald in 2014, a one-way
ANOVA creates multiple observations of the measurement variable for each value of the
nominal variable. In this case, the measurement variable is the temperature and the nominal
variable is the months of the years. The idea of the test is to calculate the mean within the group
and compare the variance among the means to the average variance within each group.

Table 1. One-way ANOVA for monthly surface temperature from 2000-2011 on Lake Taal
, Batangas
Table 2. One-way ANOVA for annual surface temperature from 2000-2011 on Lake Taal ,
Batangas

To determine if the differences between the means are statistically significant, the p-value
calculated must be compared to the significance level to assess the null hypothesis. A
significance level of 0.05 was used in the test. In the monthly surface temperature, the p-value
calculated was 9.29 x 10-9 , which is lower than the 0.05 significance level. The p-value (p<0.05)
calculated shows that there is a difference between the means of the monthly surface temperature
on Lake Taal from the year 2000-2011. On the other hand, the p-value of the annual surface
temperature was 0.2627, which is higher than the 0.05 significance level. The p-value (p>0.05)
calculated shows that there is no difference between the means of the annual surface
temperature.

References:

McDonald, J.H. 2014. Handbook of Biological Statistics (3rd ed.). Sparky House Publishing, Baltimore, Maryland.

McDonald, J.H., R. Seed and R.K. Koehn. 1991. Allozymes and morphometric characters of
three species of Mytilus in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres. Marine Biology 111:323-
333.