What can you do with two year 11 students and 5 days?

The answer is masses if they are some of the exceptional students that the Growing Regional and Agricultural Students in Science (GRASS) programme at UNE attracts.
Dominic Jones and Gabrielle Joice, both from Tamworth, spent a week with the Cotton Hub at UNE undertaking an investigation into the effects of lubricants used in soil coring on microbial activity. This of course involved the obligatory coring itself, which Dom said “left his abs sore for a week” and a load of respirometry measurements, which Gabby summarised as “monotonous”.

GRASS students hard at work with the petrol hammer and coring tubes

Gabby Joice driving a soil core with a petrol hammer to take samples at UNE

Gabby taking soil cores

Dominic jones smiling whilst operating out portable coring rig in Armidale

Dom, working on his abs whilst coring.

The reason for doing the work was to determine whether we had made a wise decision in avoiding the use of oils in our soil coring for microbial work or if all those extra hours washing out cores had been a waste of time. We’d never found the time to address this until the GRASS placements gave us an ideal opportunity.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hand texturing and lab work for GRASS students

Gabby Joice hand texturing a clay loam in the UNE Soils lab

A bit of hand texturing.

Dominic and Gabby loading the respirometer

loading the repsirometer. Yes, it is monotonous.

Discovering what oils did to soil respiration

So what did Dom and Gabby find? Turns out we’d not been that foolish after all. Exposure of sections of the sampled core to the various spray oils to mimic their use in coring did not affect microbial respiration, however, when we increased the oil volume and reduced the soil mass it was noted that two of the oils were very effective at promoting soil microbial respiration.  Of course, being switched on students they pointed out that we did not assess the oils impact on soil Carbon, but just how much do  year 11 students think is possible in a week?