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Shelly Wu, Week 2-3

The last two weeks consisted of hot-water extractions, TOC analysis, and experimental design.

Initially, Dr. Plante told us to run two trials with three samples in each of our individual trials. Kyle and I would be using two different soil-to-water ratios in order to figure out which is better. I had a lot of free time in the lab when the samples were on the end-to-end shaker or were heating up for TOC analysis, so I spent the time reading some primary articles and sometimes my summer reading when I was tired. For TOC analysis of trial 1, we used mid-range kits, which allow for smaller concentrations of carbon, but it turned out that some concentrations were higher than the range of 15-150mg/L, so we decided to use high-range kits for trial 2. In trial 2, one of the sample concentrations was negative, which represented an experimental error. After discussing with Dr. Plante, we decided to add a trial 3. However, our results were not nice either. We did not use syringes for these practice trials because they are expensive, so we think that it might be an important reason for our weird data.

After the practice hot-water extractions, I spent the rest of week 3 designing my experiment. I went through the “sample master” spreadsheet in which I recorded the amounts of soil residues left from Liz. After eliminating the samples that are 0s and missing, I divided up the remaining samples and figured out some variables that might affect soil carbon concentrations: soil orders, bedrock types, forest types, and depths. Dr. Plante told me that soil orders are affected by bedrock types so they could be examined together, and according to previous research, forest types would not have a significant impact on carbon concentrations. Therefore, I decided to examine how bedrock types/soil orders and depths of soil samples taken affect the concentrations. My experiment would have 48 samples, and they would be run in four batches due to the limited space on our stir plate and TOC heating machine. I learned much from the process of experimental design. It was not easy, especially due to the large number of samples I had, but the sense of accomplishment I gained after finishing the work made it more interesting than it would be.

Hopefully, I would be able to finish conducting these extractions in the next two weeks and can have some time to do several trials of thermal analysis.


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