This week, I started our WIFP Bioenergy unit/project.  It will culminate in a poster session during the first week in January, but first we had to do some remediation.  After some probing, it was abundantly clear that my students had a very weak understanding of photosynthesis.  We have started discussing the process (and respiration) and will continue to work it into our WIFP experiments as well.

Our first endeavor was to learn a little about how a variety of environmental factors affect photosynthesis rate.  We used the WIFP leaf disc lab protocol.  Each pair of students did a control experiment (mostly to learn the technique) followed by another trial where they changed a variable.  Some chose light color, pH of solution, variety of WIFP and others.  Results have been mixed so far...as there are many variables that should be carefully controlled (leaf thickness, disc size, degree of infusion, etc) which makes it difficult to compare data.