WEEK 5 (20/05/15)

Plants keep growing and water doesn’t decreases too much, very similar to the last week. The plants start looking for light, especially parsley, so they move to the window. No changes for the non-fertilized soil part where nothing grows.

PLANT	AVERAGE GROWN
Flowers (fertilized soil)	5, 42 cm
Lentils (fertilized soil)	13, 07 cm
Lentils (normal soil)	0 cm
Prasley (mixed soil)	5, 57 cm

Oxygen this time increased back to 0, 47% which means an increase of 3% but the quantity of CO₂ maintains at 0,01% (10022 ppm). The temperature this time stayed at 28ºC.

The fact that oxygen quantity changes but we observe no changes on the CO₂ percentage makes us think we maybe did something wrong, probably when we were calculating the oxygen, CO2 and temperature, and we had to open the tank slightly.

WEEK 4 (13/05/15)

The three types of plants have grown at least a little bit, that means everything is working but the part where soil wasn’t fertilized, nothing grows there. The water is creating a lot of condensation and the little pool decreases very slowly, which means they could survive with that amount of water for a long time.

PLANT	AVERAGE GROWN
Flowers (fertilized soil)	3,31 cm
Lentils (fertilized soil)	11,14 cm
Lentils (normal soil)	0 cm
Prasley (mixed soil)	3,78 cm

Oxygen had decreased a 0, 06% since last time which is very few and give us a 0, 44% but CO₂ stays at  10018 ppm (0,01%), no changes. Finnally, temperature increased to 28ºC (+2º).

Top view

Front view

WEEK 3 (06/05/15)

Flowers continue growing at a regular velocity, lentils have started to grow in the fertilized soil part but there is still nothing in the normal soil. Parsley is in the same state than the last day. The water continues condensating and there is still water in the tank.

VARIABLES:

Independent: Those that we voluntarily decided to alter; in this case we would say that we mean the product of the mass by increasing / temperature variation.

Dependents: are those who will be affected depending on how we treat the independent variable, so this will be the product of the time and power by.

Subsidiaries: Those that remains constant so as not to unduly affect the way in which the independent variable affects the dependent. Then we say that in this case will be the way of measuring the temperature in the experiment, the heater power, the time spent and finally the initial temperature.

Oxygen	0, 50%
CO2	10018 ppm
Temperature	26ºC

Growing average of plants (0.2cm margin of error)

PLANT	AVERAGE GROWN
Flowers (fertilized soil)	3, 58 cm
Lentils (fertilized soil)	1 cm
Lentils (normal soil)	0 cm
Prasley (mixed soil)	0 cm

Flowers & Lentils

Parsley & Flowers

Thermometer

WEEK 2 (04/05/15)

We looked at how the plants were growing and if there were any problem. 
We observed that the flowers started growing but the both lentils and parsley hadn't started to grow yet. 
This may be due to the type of soil, in the flower’s part, there was fertilizer and abundant water but the other the soil had less fertilizer and less water access. 


Apart from that, the water condensates slowly so I think we are doing it well, water doesn’t totally evaporates and the fact that the lentils and parsley have not grown yet can be because they grow slower than the flowers.

Since there wasn't much to calculate here we didn't do the part of collecting data on CO2 and Oxygen levels, nor humidity, because the plants hadn't really grown much.

front view (flowers)

top view (light)

WEEK 1 (29/04/15)

At the start of the new project we filled back the tank but this time with a mixture of normal soil and fertilized soil. There wasn't enough normal soil so we didn't do half and half as we originally planned. The tank was divided in 3 equal parts, lentils, flowers and parsley. Supposedly each section was going to have half fertilized soil and half normal soil, but in the end only the lentils had half fertilized soil and half normal soil, the other had half fertilized soil and half mixture of fertilized and normal. We put the water in a lateral of the tank for it to create a separation between the three types of plants that we are going to study.

Parsley Lentils

Flowers

START OF THE NEW PROJECT

We restarted the experiment due to a fail with the snails that caused their death, plants didn’t grow and snails didn’t have food. The fact that the plants had grown slower this time may be caused by the type of soil becausse in this try, the soil wasn't fertilized.

Because of this problem, all snails died... or not:

Here we can see the survival of the fittest

We had a problem with bringing in the snails too soon since we couldn't keep them anywhere else. The soil we used that time wasn't fertilized so the plants weren't able to grow properly. The snails were kept inside the tank with the ungrown plants, they had air holes until the plants would grow but when nothing flourished, the snails died because they didn't have any food. In the end onl one of the snails survived and we decided to go back to the original project.

Finally...

Even though we know that the conclusion and evaluation for the project must be written down in the third trimester, we would like to elaborate a list with a series of things we could have done during the second trimestre to have completed it better. All the points which have been successfully completed during this term have already been dealt with in previous entries. 

And so, lets begin with the list of improvements:

Firstly, we would have to point out that the principle problem is that we didn't plan the project correctly, the view on the project we choose wasn't really thought out well. Our project was quite too basic for the type of conclusion and data that were expected from a  more complex project, which would take us to say that if we had to redo the project we would centre the project around something that could be able to give more specific data.

Secondly, at the moment of elaborating the project, it is clear to see we lacked organization skill that would have made the project come together much more smoothly, this problem is due to seeing how after a few weeks we realized that we had sort of started to create a biosphere instead of the initial water cycle project. Also, our intention was to incorporate life to the biosphere by adding insects and and other life forms to see if they could survive and prove that we had successfully created a biosphere. But since we didn't count on that the project would be done in winter, we weren't very able to find said insects. En consecuencia no pudimos incorporar vida a nuestra biosfera, que era una fase muy importante de nuestro experimento.

Lastly, we would like to point out general thing we should have changed or fixed; we should have started thinking in what type of project to do, and in our case, because of lack of imagination and because of the few information we could find on the internet as an investigation, we should have asked for more help at the beginning of the project  

Once we had fixed there aspects, we should have taken into account the conditions in which we would develop the project, both environmentally as well as the problems with the finding of the insects.

In conclusion, the only thing left to say is that it was completely our fault that the project failed since we weren't able to incorporate the insects. However we have tried very hard to keep the project going in the end, focusing on the errors that we made and how to improve them. But still, we shouldn't ignore the aspects of the project we weren't able to complete.