First Day

Today was the official start date of my and Sarah Ashcraft-Johnson's soil research internship with Dr. Bala Chaudhary! Our experiment will consist of setting up a green roof (we hope on top of the Institute of Environmental Sustainability) at Loyola University Chicago in order to examine whether native plants or the traditional green roof sedum mix provides more green roof services like water retention, carbon sequestration, reduction of the urban heat island effect, and beneficial relationships between mycorrhizal fungi and plants. 

Native plants

We have already begun growing the plants in the greenhouse of IES and will be setting up the green roof next week (we hope).

Sedum mix

 Until then, we organized the lab and set up a MIP (Mycorrhizal Inoculum Potential). 

Here's a before and after of the lab:

Before

After

The MIP will provide a baseline of data on how much mycorrhizal fungi is already present in the soil before we begin the experiment. In order to view the live fungi, a bioassay is required. Corn will be used for the bioassay because it maximizes its relationship with the fung in order to receive lots of phosphate; each plant will grow in its own "conetainer" for a month in each of our different treatments of soils. The different treatments are: 
        1) soil with a live native inoculum that Dr. Chaudhary cultivated herself!
        2) soil with a sterilized inoculum 
        3) soil that was bare that will go to the Chicago Botanic Garden 
        4) soil that was bare that will go on Loyola's campus 
        5) soil planted with sedum that will go to CBG 
        6) soil planted with sedum that will go on Loyola's campus. 

Note: Kelly Ksiazek, a PhD candidate at Northwestern University, will be focusing on the  above-ground biomass of the experiment at two different locations. Check out here blog here: http://phippsbotanyinaction.org/

Once the plants are established, we will look at the mycorrhizal colonization of each of the treatments. While this seems to be a tedious task, it will be very important in providing a starting point when trying to measure the growth of the mycorrhizal colonies throughout our experiment, which will tell us a little more about about the effect mycorrhizal fungi has on the performance of plants in green roofs.

Organic corn germinating!

"Conetainers" labeled and ready to go

The corn germinates in a dish with just a little bit of deionized water (covering it about half-way). Certified organic corn seeds are used in order to ensure that no anti-fungal treatment has been applied to the seeds which would inhibit our results. Deionized water is also used in germinating the corn in order to prevent other contaminants that may be present in the water from interfering with the seeds. Once the corn has germinated, we will fill the "conetainers" with our treated soils. We will do five replicates of our six different treatments, thus, we will have 30 little corn plants. We hope to fill the "conetainers" with soil tomorrow and place the germinated corn seed in the soil (a small radical will have developed in two days). That's all for now!