Presenter(s): Elizabeth Baach
Faculty Mentor(s): Lauren Hallett & Eliza Hernández
Poster 1
Session: Sciences
The project I will continue to work on addresses the question, ‘is there a significant difference in nitrogen composition of plants on and off ant mounds in a low nutrition environment, serpentine grasslands?’. This research is significant in two ways: First, it furthers previous works that investigate the relationship between subsurface dwelling animals and the nutrient availability for the plants that grow on the mounds they create. While there has been significant research looking at these relationships, there is less on analyzing elemental plant composition as I propose here. Second, my research will be contributing to the academic understanding of ecology by looking at serpentine grasslands in a new way. These serpentine grasslands receive a lot of attention from academic researchers as the soil in the area has low quantities of essential nutrients, phosphorus and nitrogen, and high levels of toxic heavy metals; this specific soil composition only allows specialized plant species to survive. These plants dominated these grasslands, however, recent research has shown that human activity has increased nitrogen deposition, allowing invasives to begin establishing and outcompeting the native flora. The way I will be furthering this well established understanding of these grasslands will be through the examination of nitrogen content of both native and nonnative grasses and forbs that could be gaining nitrogen naturally or through nutrient upwelling caused by ants. Looking at previous research, my experimental design and considering nitrogen deposition, I expect to find that there will be higher nitrogen composition in invasive plants when comparing native to nonnative status plants. I also believe that plants situated on ant mounds will have higher nitrogen composition than those away from the mounds, this because non-native plants have been shown to outcompete native species in high nitrogen conditions and because ants bring up previously unavailable nutrients to plants.