Comparison of rate of decay between maple and beech leaves
This article submitted by McMinn, Mayher, Roush, Nudelman, Petronella on 9/28/97.
The purpose of this lab is to determine and compare the rate of decay beweent two different types of leaves, maple and beech, in different environments. The environments we chose are pond water, dry dirt and distilled water (control). In each environment we will place 25 leaves for each leaf type. The leaves will be leaves directly off of the trees, in order to assure that no previous decay has taken place.
Each leaf will be enclosed in either cheese cloth or wire mesh, depending on cost and availability. We will use a special enclosure for the two different water submersion environments and we will use a cardboard box lined with plastic garbage bags in order to keep the dry dirt environment dry.
We will mass the leaves in their enclosures before we set them out to decay and label them so that we can compare their decayed mass to their original mass. We will remove five leaves per week of each type of leaf, all on one day. The day of the week will be determined by the day that we set them out. We will use statistical methods to compare and contrast the decay of the leaves.
Our predictions are that the leaves in the pond water will decay the most rapidly because there are more decomposing agents in the pond water than in the other two environments. We also think that the beech leaves will decay more rapidly because it has more surface area than the maple leaves.
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