Project:

Is ant species diversity impacted by various levels of human applied pesticides, fertilizer, and activity?

Students:

Ella Chalmers, Manar Mabrouk, Sophia Aebisher

School:

Connetquot High School, Suffolk

Mentors:

John Halloran

Abstract:

Human impact on the planet has drastically reduced the biodiversity of its environments. Ant biodiversity has faced many challenges over the past couple of years. Unfortunately, humans have changed the environment to the point where many different species are affected. Our goal with this campaign is to see how everyday human interaction with the environment affects the diversity of different species of ants. We chose ants for our campaign because they are great indicator of environmental changes, since they react rapidly to different changes. Ants can be found in many different environments and they are a great organism to barcode. We are collecting ants from different places with different levels of human interaction, seeing how the diversity of ants changes. The data we use will help answer the question whether and biodiversity is truly affected by human interactions.

Poster:

Team samples: