Restoration Field Ecology Field Trip

In today's field trip, I had the wonderful opportunity to work with my peers as well as professional field ecologists to help restore Glacial Park in Mchenry county. Although ecological restoration is costly and is very time consuming and includes a lot of hard work, it is all worth while. Being able to keep plant species alive is beneficial because we are also helping to keep different animal and insect species alive as well which helps keep the circle of life going on. I feel that this process of restoring what was already made on Earth is important and humans owe it to our surroundings since we have been continuously destroying it over the years. 

 

One of the beneficial things we did today was we gathered seeds that are extremely tiny and clustered in a certain lactation and we put them I'm cups to deliver them to a whole different area. Since these seeds are so small, people pay a lot for them, but we were able to simply pick them and transport them to a place where they can continue to flourish. 

Later on, the field ecologist gave us purchased seeds that we're put In buckets for all of us to spread out within a very large area. By planting more seeds, as we all did in our groups today, we are restoring what was lost from different animals or different natural things that got rid of them. Since each group used different seeds, it allows for a chance for all different plants to grow back and restore the marsh. 

AP Bio Water Lab

Station 4: Density of water.

In this lab we used a pipette to put cold water that was dyed green into another beaker of room temperature water to test how the density of water affects the way it interacts with each other. The colder water sunk to he bottom while the warmer water went above it, we could see this happen because the colder, green dyed water sifted itself to the bottom of the beaker. Heat rises, so naturally the warmer water is less dense than the colder water.

 Station 6: polar solvent

In this experiment, we tested whether water solvents conducted electricity with salt or with sugar. With salt, the water was able to conduct electricity. However, the sugar water couldn't. Salt was able to conduct because when salt (NaCl) is dissolved in water, it loses an electron to chloride. Since sugar  doesn't conduct electricity, it proves that its ions do not bounce around.

Station 1: polarity in water molecules

In this lab, we dropped water drop by drop onto a penny and discovered the water molecules were polar and clung together but once we poked it with a toothpick covered in soap, the water dispersed due to the non polarity from the soap.