Preview
Affiliation
Faculty
Publication Date
4-30-2020
Description
This is a picture of our common garden, the culmination of years of plant growth and preparation for a temperature experiment on Sphagnum magellanicum populations that originated from multiple locations in North America. The experiment is designed to test whether these populations, which span a latitudinal gradient, differ significantly in their photosynthetic physiology and we sought to test this with a 2.5 month temperature trial that commenced with either a temperature increase or decrease, depending on trial conditions. The challenge has been that these are very slow growing plants, and it has taken 3 years to get them to the proper size and have all the pieces (trained, people, equipment, time) in place. The lab group (Sarah Griswold '20, Keely Lovato '20, John Scandale '20, Xiaoxuan Hu '20, Chris Goodall '22, James Loveland '22) were scheduled to initiate the experiment just after spring break 2020, during the week of March 30 - April 5 with final data collection scheduled to occur in June 2020. But as the COVID-19 crisis developed and restrictions were implemented, it became clear that we would have to postpone beginning the experiment. Originally, we opted to shift the timeline to begin the experiment in May or June 2020, but with the cancellation of all Summer Scholar programs at Kenyon in April this plan also has to be reevaluated. Currently, we plan to begin the experiment in June 2021, but sadly the seniors that have been part of this project since its inception in 2017 will not be able to participate.
City
Gambier, Ohio
Keywords
lab, garden, sphagnum magellanicum
Recommended Citation
Bickford, Christopher P., "Growing Experiment" (2020). In Photographs. 61.
https://digital.kenyon.edu/covid19photos/61
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share Alike 4.0 International License.
Keywords
lab, garden, sphagnum magellanicum