Project:

Aquatic plants invaders of New Jersey

Students:

Ava Miller, Ella Bao

School:

Tenafly HS, Other

Mentors:

anat firnberg

Abstract:

In this Urban Barcoding Project, we aim to identify some of the aquatic/semi-aquatic invasive species that are present in and/or near water sources in New Jersey. When at the two water sources, we will look for plant species that are commonly found, which can suggest that they are invasive if they are of foreign origins. We hypothesize that our data will reveal that some of the plant species we take our samples from would be nonindigenous, making them invasive species. We based our hypothesis upon the various invasive species of aquatic plants that are found on the Invasive Plant Species list by The Native Plant Society of New Jersey. Despite the list being incomplete, there are already more than 100 plant species in New Jersey that have been listed as invasive, making them a critical issue. We decided to focus on aquatic/semi-aquatic plants for this project because people tend to only pay attention to land plants when discussing invasive plant species, ignoring the aquatic ones in the

Poster:

Team samples: