| Explore | Overwatering can kill some plants but other plants thrive in it. Depending on the soil type water will either pass through the soil quickly or slowly and nutrients will leach at the rate that the water moves. How do different plants in the same region need to survive with different resources? Why do different plants need different soil types and reasorces? |
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| Research Question | How does flooding the soil affect how plants grow? We came up with this because we want to test how a plant will react/ what it will do when it is flooded, and when we flood it we can see up close what will happen. This fits with the topic because we know that different plants and soil types react to an excess of water differently. |
| Predictions | For the flooding experiment the outcomes that we are expecting are that the pot with the over watered soybeans will not grow and it will eventually die. The reasoning for this is that once there is too much water the root system will begin to rot which will kill the plant. However for the other pot that we will continue to water normally we expect the soybeans to grow normally. |
| Experimental Design | We plan to water radish and corn plants plants normally until we see growth and then after that flood one consistently and water the other usually. We have two trays with 5 holes poked in the bottom with coffee filters on top of the holes. We have potting soil with radishes planted in that same tray. The variable that we can measure would be the amount of water going into each radish plant and we can observe how much water the plant can absorb and how long until the over-watered one dies. The variable that we can keep constant is that we will continue to water one plant normally every day. We can record our data by making a table with how much water we poured in and make observations about what happens. |
| Conclusion | In a flooded environment, plants don't develop the root systems they need to continue growing. We continuously flooded one group of plants, and they didn't develop strong and wide root systems. The control side gave us a model for what a root system should look like, and there were great differences between the shape and lengths of the root and stem systems. We collected data by measuring the lengths of our plants, and this showed us that flooding does stunt the growth of plants by eliminating the nutrients they need to grow. In the future, we could try to plant them in a bigger space, so they could continue to grow and see how the flooding affects them as they get even bigger. |
| Investigation Theme | AFW |
| Grade Level | High School Students (Grades 9,10,11,12) |
| Teacher Name | Carrie Bradley |
| School Name | Lincolnton High School |
| Session | Spring 2022 |