Is Aluminum killing the plants in your backyard?

A study of Aluminum in Roland Park Country School's backwoods.

THE CREW       Daneey Makia in Pink

Lily MacKenty in Black                                 Lindsay Wilson in Purple

THE RESEARCH

                                            When starting this project we wanted to pick an experiment that was interesting and a challenge to us. The aluminum levels in the backwoods at Roland Park Country School have been rapidly increasing within the past six years and nobody understands how the plants back there can survive. The data we had showed that the sites with the largest amount of aluminum in the soil had the most plants. The site which had once been populated heavily with plant life had been deserted of the Jewelweed that had once been the main plant in that area. Up to the challenge, our group decided that maybe the reason why one site had high aluminum levels and high plant life but another site, had a lower amount of aluminum in the soil and diminishing plants could relate to how the different plants intake of aluminum. We picked three different plants Jewelweed, Paw Paw, and English Ivy to be our common plant between the two sites chosen. After gathering our data and graphing them we were proven sadly incorrect, but that’s half the fun in science, trying another hypothesis based off of your previous idea.