Hi Ryan, Micah, and Fletcher. I, too, like all of those things. Gearing up for snowboarding season has me excited. But, being in California, I'll have to hope we get a big winter after a few years of extreme drought. We had a good one last year,…
moreHi Ryan, Micah, and Fletcher. I, too, like all of those things. Gearing up for snowboarding season has me excited. But, being in California, I'll have to hope we get a big winter after a few years of extreme drought. We had a good one last year, but here's hoping for another!
To answer your question, Ryan: I'm a 3rd year PhD student at University of California, Merced studying controls on drought tolerance in conifers ranging from the cell to the whole forest. I look at how variation in wood cell anatomy interact with whole-tree processes, and how climate and competition influence the success of drought tolerance strategies.
So for now I'm a student like yourself, and I also teach Evolution to undergraduate students, while also conducting research year-round. Most of my work takes place in the field, where I am coring trees, measuring them, climbing them to collect cones, and bringing all of that material back to the lab where I measure tree rings and take micron-thick wood sections to put under a microscope and measure individual cells.
For the project, I see you updated the info. So you're looking at how sunlight and lamp light influence growth. One thing to consider is the type of light coming from the sun versus a lamp. A lamp may be on the all the time, but think about how light from the sun can burn you. This is because of ultraviolet (UV) light. Do lamps have UV light? How do you think this will influence your experiment? What do you know about how plants "sense" light?
Also, if a seed is underground, would UV light matter? Maybe the light being on will change soil temperature. Would the seed be germinating at different times because of different amounts of light, or because of differences in temperature? Just some things to think about.