Ooh! Fun! Do you have equipment that will allow you to test soil moisture?
An idea I have for you is the following:
Find three different ecosystems near your house. (If you have a forest nearby, or a really dry area, or a big prairie, these are good choices or examples of different areas you could choose)
Once you've found these, you can do a science project on how soil moisture affects biodiversity. The way you will count biodiversity is by performing net sweeps where you will trap insects in these areas, and then count the number of different bugs in the net. (For example, if you catch 2 butterflies, 3 ants, and 5 beetles, you would have 3 different insect types.)
Then, you can count the number of different plant species in that environment. Again, not the number of plants, but different species.
You will use quadrat sampling to achieve all of this. You can read up on quadrat sampling here
http://www.coml.org/investigating/obser ... pling.html
Quadrats will allow you to model the whole ecosystem in one tiny area.
Then, you can measure soil moisture in all of these environments.
You can see how soil moisture affects biodiversity (amount of species).
You could also do a science fair where you see if soil color affects soil moisture. This would probably be easier, but less in-depth.
https://www.sciencebuddies.org/science- ... d-moisture
Here's the project guide for this project.
Or how plant growth is affected by soil moisture.
The possibilities are endless!!
If you're confused or don't like this idea, we can take a look at it again and we can reevaluate; no worries!
Let me know!
Stay nerdy,
lmp1341
