I asked Maddy Shay,class of 2015, to write a post about her involvement with the
Environmental Summer Research Experience for Young Women at Roland Park Country School first as a participant in 2013 and then again as a Teaching Assistant in 2014. Even though this isn't a Friends School program, students from Friends School regularly participate.
Maddy writes:
The goal of the Environmental Summer Research Experience for Young Women is to investigate environmental anomalies, particularly ones involving soil, while educating young girls on various scientific skills in both the field and the lab. The program starts with a biota survey that takes about a week and a day out of the three week program. This is when groups divide up between four sites and collect as much data as possible from their site having to do with the chemicals in the soil, plant populations, and presence of arthropods. Keep reading for more details and links to the work she produced after the jump!
After all of this data is collected, a statistical analysis is performed to quantify all of the data and make it comparable to the data from the other sites. Then all the data is put up on the chalkboard and participants look for anomalies. They are then put into new groups in which they choose an anomaly and design a research project around it and publish a scientific research journal about it to explain the results of your research.
After being an intern for the program, I was asked to return as a Teaching Assistant. In my new role I lead a group in their biota survey and conducted my own, slightly more sophisticated, research project with my fellow TAs.
In my first year as an intern, my group noticed an unusually high amount of potassium in the site farthest up the hill. This is unusual because potassium is water soluble and is generally found in larger amounts in soil at the bottom of hills because it flows downhill with the rain water. This is what my group chose to investigate. We did some research online and discovered that potassium can get trapped in the clay in the soil. Soil is made of three distinct grades: sand, silt, and clay. During the biota survey we were able to find what percentage of the soil was each component. The soil at the top of the hill had the highest clay percentage so we hypothesized that was the cause of the unusually high potassium levels. While our data did show a clear correlation between clay and potassium levels, we found out after having started the project that the group who had found the original clay percentages from that site during the biota survey had messed up their math so while we did prove a correlation, there was nothing to show that was what caused the high potassium levels.
After being an intern for the program, I was asked to return as a Teaching Assistant. In my new role I lead a group in their biota survey and conducted my own, slightly more sophisticated, research project with my fellow TAs. For the past seven years the nitrate levels in the soil of one of the sites had been on a steady decline which was affecting the plant growth in the site. Groups before us had investigated the moisture levels in the soil and we were able to see that the water from what was once a delta, had sunk deeper into a narrow channel in the soil after a dam broke. We hypothesized that this change in water flow was flushing out the nitrate and thereby causing the plant population to go down. After collecting data in the field for several days we conducted all kinds of different tests in the lab to look for anything that could affect the nitrate levels in the soil. Depending on one's interpretation of our statistical analysis we were able to definitively prove that it was the change in moisture that was affecting the nitrate levels in the site.
-Maddy Shay
Check out the ESRE website for more details
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