I need help writting a introduction for a sceintific lab report. Their is a script from a video which is in order and i will give you my introduction to help . 250

words

Methods: We are going to be carrying out a scientific investigation on the fields (sites) of the Open University campus. We researched two distinct stands of deciduous and evergreen woodland to find a possible difference between their soil PH.

Materials The materials used in this study included:

• Trowel
• Small ruler
• Sample plastic bag
• Tape Measure 30 meters
• Recording sheet
• Bamboo Poles

We are going to be investigation two destinct stands of deciduous and corniferous woodland soil PH found on the open university site in Milton Keynes?

The base of are investigation is to find a difference in the soil pH between the deciduous and coniferous stands . We started by entering each site analyse its charecteristics and functions of the.After the analysis we had enough knowalege of how the two stands fuctions we were ready to start .

Are first step was to plan where we're going to collect our first sample from. We stretched a 20 meter tape measure along the edge of the deciduous woodland to mark our site. We decided to collect 10 replicates so we then proceded to divide it into five metre blocks and use 5 metre by 5 metre squares. So if we can run this tape measure out forten metres and then that will give us a 2 by 5 grid. Then we used a random number table that had a whole string of numbers.We then proceeded to use the two first columns as the first sampling point to write down are data - five metre by 5 metre blocks, so we'll go 5 or 8 * 50 centimetres in, which is 4 metres along. Before we started the sampling process we got 10 sample bags and wrote are initials and date of the collection and a recoding sheet to write out all the information we need for are experiment such has date, name and site. Before actually collecting the sample we cleared the litter layer that is on the surface of the soil depth and of course the litter is a variable, we then we dug down to a depth of 5 centimetre and then collected a soil sample we continued this process until we had 10 sample from each the stand.

This is the script :

All right. So thanks, Phil. So yes, the first thing when you're going to undertake an investigation is to familiarise yourself with the site. So you should see in a second coming up onto your screen some drone footage of the site where we are, taken on a day actually not too dissimilar to this in a previous year and you can see looking down from above we're in front of a woodland stand here on the campus in Milton Keynes and you can see there's two distinct stands in this in this woodland. So to the foreground here is a deciduous woodland so no leaves on the trees so looking sort of greyish in in the in the imagery here of horse chestnut the conker tree. So an introduced species to Britain but well established has been here for over 400 years I believe. And next to this is the darker greener component is the Evergreen stand. It's a Scots pine stand. So obviously with needles on at this time of year is an evergreen. To the South side, so closest to us at the moment, is a tennis court and bounding the site on the on the western side is an open cricket field and to the northern side is some undeveloped land that's just part of the general urban area of Milton Keynes. So that's what it looks like from above. But now you can have the opportunity to go in and see what it actually looks like inside the woodland. And so Phil go and please take a closer look.

PW:

Great. Thank you. Yes. If you come with me and we'll go deep into the heart of the woodland and explore and have a little bit more of a look at the characteristics of the site. So I'm going to introduce you to the deciduous part of the site and Sarah is going to introduce you to the coniferous part. As we do that it would be great if you could jot down or type in some little notes, or if you've got a good memory of the things that we introduce to you because we'll come back to those shortly.

So starting off with the deciduous site, it's dominated, as Kadmiel said, by these trees which are horse chestnut trees. They don't have the leaves on at the moment but they're easily distinguishable by these sticky chestnut-coloured very large buds. If we take a look up to the canopy of the woodland here then we can see with this being a deciduous site at this time of year there's no leaves on the

trees. So that's obviously a key driver of the ecology of this site. On a day like today we can see a glorious blue sky above us and as a feature of deciduous woodlands then obviously light is coming through the canopy at this time of the year and feeding the forest floor. As we look down through to the mid storey, there's quite a lot of shrubs growing around the woodland. And because it's been so warm in this part of Britain this year, actually all over Britain I think this year, then then the season's about a month ahead of where it normally would be. So usually when we're investigating this site we don't see leaves on the shrubby trees at all. But here we've got a dog Rose that's growing behind me that's already come into leaf and over in this direction. Kate [camera person] we can have a look? You can see that there's a cherry plum that's growing, that's already in flower and has burst its buds as well.

Coming down a little bit closer to me, then there's other small shrubby trees that make up the shrub layer. One of them is the hawthorn, which is this little thing that's growing just here. And there's other things like the elder, which is quite abundant around here. We can then have a look down at the woodland floor and we can see that there's a reasonable variety of ground flora already growing here. Some of this has survived through the winter. Some of it has emerged in the last few weeks. So for example, over here there's a species called the white dead nettle. It looks like a stinging nettle, but it isn't. We have stinging nettles here also, but this isn't one of them. There's this species, which is Geranium robertianum or Herb Robert, which has got red stems and dark green leaves, and the species that may be familiar to you if you've walked in your local woodlands, which is called Lords and ladies. It's a type of Arum and it produces a sort of a kind of spiky flower. So as well as the ground flora then there's a very clear litter layer. Obviously with a deciduous woodland, the leaf litter falling down from the canopy then stays and gradually decomposes and we've got lots of evidence of that here. And it's not just composed of leaves, there's bits of horse chestnut shells, so conker shells and little bits of conkers themselves. And that then leads into a rich organic layer at the top of the soil. If I can dig down and get my fingers mucky in here then we can see a very nice, rich, loamy, dark soil that's fairly consistent in colour. It gets slightly paler as I dig down further. And it's been extremely wet here over the last few weeks, so there's a degree of moisture in the soil there as well. So that's a quick introduction to some of the characteristics of the deciduous part of the site and now over to Sarah to have a look at what the coniferous part of the site looks like.

OK, so now we're going to move from the deciduous area to the evergreen area. So we're going to walk down the pathway between the tennis courts and this little patch of woodland and you can see we're moving through and we've got some snowberry in the undergrowth here. It's quite dense undergrowth. So we're moving out of the deciduous area into the evergreen area and we start to get to the pine trees. So this is a Scots pine tree looking good. And then moving further on, we've got lots more under storey here, some blackberries. And then here we come across an area where a tree came down fairly recently in some bad weather. And you can see that it's broken off from the bits lying on the ground there. And if you look further into the woodland, you can see that there's some evidence of management. So we've got some logs that have been chopped up and piled up, leaving them there for habitat piles in the woodland. And then if we carry on walking down, I'm hoping we're going to find a nice area where we can go into the woodland again. There's lots more blackberries here, which have beautiful, lovely, delicious fruits in the autumn. And then if we move into, there's a little path here where we can get into the woodland. OK, so I step over here without falling over. Then we can go inside the woodland and see what we can find.

So the canopy here is denser at this time of year. So if we look up into the canopy, you can see that the pine needles are on the trees. You can see the blue sky through. But the canopy at this time of year is denser in this area than it is in the deciduous area. But obviously during the summer when the leaves grow in the deciduous area, the canopy would be much denser over there than it is over this side.

OK, So moving down, we've got some smaller trees and shrubs. So we've got some elder here that's coming out into leaf. And if we look over there, we can see that we've got a blackthorn again that's coming out into flower quite early. We wouldn't really expect it to normally be out, but it's been a mild start to the year.

OK, And then moving down. As I said we've got lots of blackberries, we've got snowberries, we've got some remains of nettles, some tall nettles from last year. And then moving down again onto the forest floor. So we've got a layer of plants on the forest floor. We've got some Ivy, which is nice, dark green, healthy Ivy. We've got some goose grass or cleavers here. We've got quite a lot of stinging nettles and then moving down into the little layer, we've got remains of plants, stalks, bits of twig.

And then let me just move down and look underneath. So we've got some pine needles that have fallen down. They're still quite intact at the moment, but then if we dig further into... So let's just find a little bit that's in the sunshine, I can get to, umm... OK, let's dig here right through the litter layer. So we've got some bit of rubbish there, but some more decayed organic matter, so it's starting to rot down. And then we've got this soil. So I'll dig some of this up and you can see the soil, it's quite dark, it's quite sticky, but it's still got lots of organic matter through it and it's quite damp and moist, OK, And so that's the end of the little tour of the evergreen area. Back over now to Kadmiel and Phil.

So what we'd like you to do now is to think about the things, and if you heard particularly from the Deciduous site, think about some of the things that we highlighted on the deciduous site that might be interesting to investigate that might vary across this site based on your own knowledge and the observations that we've just made. And there's your chance to interact with the next widget. And what we'd like you to do there is to put in single words or phrases of two, maximum, absolute, maximum 3 words. Best one or two words that would be things that you've identified that have varied across the site and that might be interesting to study. You've got three things that you can enter. You don't need to enter all three. And remembering that all your input is anonymous, there's no wrong answers. Great. So whilst you're typing in your observations, we're going to go over to Kadmiel, who's going to show you some of the equipment that we've got at our disposal today.

All right. So yeah, I'm just going to go through a bit of the kit that we typically use when we're doing an environmental or ecological investigation. So I'm going to start off first with the sort of things we might have just for going out and setting up our sampling or marking out our site, for example. So we'll have bamboo poles or canes that we might use for marking out our plots. For example, we will have a tape measure. There's a 30 metre tape measure, we're 30 to 50 metre tape, 60 metre tape measure that we would run out if we're doing for example, a transect or marking out the areas that we are going to be taking some samples. We have our Uncle Phil's big random number table that we use for identifying sampling locations. We'll have of course very important a sample sheet for recording observations, our measurements and any other notes that are important as we go along. If we're doing some botanical work, we might have a key, like usually a field guide or a book or keys or for example. This is something that we've made-up from another investigation, which is examples of the vegetation that was at the site. So we can quickly reference what's going on of course. Very important bog standard plastic bags and paper bags for collecting samples, for taking samples back for further analysis in the laboratory for example.