| Explore | Our experiences outside of school have taught us that plants are resilient and that there are many environmental factors impacting their growth/viability. In our background research we have learned how natural disasters, specifically wildfires, impact plants. |
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| Research Question | We want to study how burnt soil can affect plant growth, to replicate how wildfires impact plants. We came up with this question through research and personal experiences with natural disasters and agriculture. This fits in with our background knowledge of controlled burns (intentionally burning off dead foliage), natural disasters, and our biological understanding of plants. |
| Predictions | There are many possible outcomes to our experiment, one being that our experiment simply doesn't work and we have no plant growth besides our controlled soil. If this were to happen we would be able to assume this is due to the fact that the fire killed growth-promoting bacteria or produced a chemical compound that inhibits plant growth. Another outcome would be germination and growth of some of our plants, but not all. We could then assume that there was a limit to the amount of time that the soil could be exposed to the fire/heat before it was no longer sustainable for plant germination and growth. One final outcome could potentially be that all of our different pots germinate and grow and are all very similar, with no noticeable difference. If this occurred we could assume that we didn't expose the soil to enough heat/not long enough and therefore it didn't make a big impact. |
| Experimental Design | Our plan is to use farm land and replicate a controlled burn for different amounts of time and use the soil from the burn to plant our pea seeds in. We will be taking our soil from the same area. We will have our controlled soil which will come from the same area before the fire has started. We will have an area that we will burn for one minute, two minutes, and then a full burn (right around five minutes). The soil will be collected immediately after the fire has been put out and put directly into the pots we will be using to grow our plants in. One pea seed will be planted in each cell. Each different time of burn will have six different cells/pots. We will be taking the top four inches of the soil from the burn to fill our cells. We will be measuring and observing the time it takes for each pot to germinate, then the height of the plants, the overall look of their health, and then the fresh weight at the end of our experiment. Our constant variables will be the type of pot, the area of where the soil is retrieved, amount of water, light, and soil, time to germinate and grow, and moisture level. The plants will have two to three weeks to germinate and grow. Our data will be recorded in our journal. |
| Investigation Theme | WOS |
| Grade Level | High School Students (Grades 9,10,11,12) |
| Teacher Name | Nichole Schelling |
| School Name | Medford High School |
| Session | Spring 2022 |