Grasslands, Joy, Craig, Stephanie, Stanley, Mariam, Gregory

On September 22, 2010 we went to Nose hill Park. Our purpose of going there was to find how people have impacted Nose Hill Park, more specifically the grassland area of Nose Hill Park. Human impact can be measured in many ways, but we decided to measure how people have impacted the natural park by seeing the levels of phosphate, nitrate, ammonia, and pH in the soil. Thus we took soil samples from the grassland area and tested them for their phosphate, nitrate, ammonia, calcium and pH levels and compared them to the levels we found in two different fields located just up the hill in Edgemont that are regularly maintained.

Sampled Area	Concentration Phosphate (mg/L)	pH level (pH	Concentration of Nitrate (mg/L)	Concentration of Ammonia (mg/L)
Nose Hill Park	0.25	6	0.0	0.25
School Field	0.50	6	0.0	0.0
Soccer Field	0.50	6	0.0	0.0

Table 1. Soil tests taken on samples retrieved from Nose Hill Park,

a school field and a soccer field, September 22, 2010.

Phosphate is one of the main ingredients in fertilizer. Phosphate helps plants grow stronger roots and allow them to produce seeds. Seeing that Nose Hill Park has less phosphate than the two fields might be because the parks are fertilized which may mean that fertilizer runoff from the areas around Nose Hill hasn’t dramatically affected it.

pH is the measure of the acidity or basicity of a solution.  If the soil is too acidic, then plants will not thrive in that environment.  On the other hand, if the soil is too basic, then plants won’t thrive there either.  Acidic soil is typically caused by a natural force, rain.  But seeing as Calgary doesn’t receive to much of that, Nose Hill should have a pretty non acidic soil pH level.  The pH at Nose Hill, as well as our two other fields was 6.  With the neutral pH being at 7, we found that the soil at all 3 places is one of the best environments for plants to survive. 

Nitrates helps plants grow above ground. We found no nitrates in the soil samples. Originally we thought this was weird because plants need nitrates, but then we came to the conclusion that we found no nitrates in the soil samples because the plants in all three places had taken up and used the nitrates in the ground.

Ammonia is decomposed matter that has gone through the process called ammonification. We found that Nose Hill Park had more ammonia than the two fields. This may be because at Nose Hill Park, nobody picks up the dried leaves and such, therefore they are left to decompose, resulting in more ammonia in the soil at Nose Hill park. In the contrary, the fields may have less ammonia because people rake up the leaves and decomposing matter rather than letting it decompose and turn into ammonia.

             We found it kind of strange that there would be more ammonia at Nose Hill, but there was the same concentration of nitrates in all three places. Since ammonia turns into nitrites and then nitrates after that, wouldn’t there be more nitrates if there was more ammonia? Then we realized that there would be more nitrates at Nose Hill Park because there is more ammonia, we just don’t see it in our test results because the plants used up the nitrates. That means that the plants at Nose Hill Park get more nitrates and therefore grows more because nitrates help plants grow about ground.        

Through the soil tests, we have come to the conclusion that Nose Hill Park is indeed affected by humans since we found such similar results in the tests. We originally thought that Nose Hill was either going not be impacted by humans because it is a natural reserve, or significantly impacted by humans because of all the run off from communities higher up. We thought that because the two fields are regularly maintained, they would therefore be fertilized for optimal growth of plants.  Nose Hill would then be unfertilized though maybe receiving doses of fertilizer from runoff.  However, our results are somewhat shocking as we see that soil from fields that are fertilized, mowed, and maintained is not much different than the soil we retrieved from Nose Hill, though the differences that we found could be what set apart a natural park and a maintained park.

References:

                  Gale, j. "Phosphorus." Water Resource Characterization DSS - Phosphorus. North Carolina State University, 1976. Web. 26 Oct 2010. <http://www.water.ncsu.edu/watershedss/info/phos.htm

            Pat, . (Photographer). (2009). Nose hill park, calgary, alberta. [Web]. Retrieved from http://www.birdcanada.com/2009/08/way-more-than-a-murder/