Lucia Lu
Lab Report
Mr. Calos
October 27, 2014
The Effect of Light and Water on the Height, Size and Color of Brassica Rapa Plants
Introduction
The study of the growth of plants had been a crucial ecological research topic for various levels of groups. Biologists Krantz and Barrow mentioned Roth’s study on the misconception about plants and plants growth that they do not grow well in the dark area or get nutrition only from soil and water in their essay Inquiry with Seeds to Meet the Science Education Standards1. Similarly, based on the observation we took during the nature walk in a temperate deciduous forest, plants tended to grow sturdier with more sunlight and more moisture soil, which also supported Roth’s theory. After the walk, our group seized to find out the effect of light and water on the height, size and color of Wisconsin Fast Plants, which is under the organism of Brassica Rapa plants. Therefore, we hypothesized that plants exposed to more light and plants that absorb more water bloom faster, taller, stronger and greener than plants that do not.
Procedure
In order to test out our hypothesis that plants expose to more light and plants that receive a surplus of water and light 24/7 grow faster and healthier than plant soaking up less light and water, we grew four sets of Wisconsin Fast Plants on four different trays that simulated four different conditions. The Wisconsin plants were set up under a light fixture so that we could regulate the amount of light they were exposed to using screening. Two of the plants were placed on the screened in side of the light while the other two received plenty of light on the exposed side of the light fixture. One plant on each side of the light fixture were hooked up to an automatic watering system using filtration pads and paper, while the other plants were watered manually daily so that we could control their level of hydration.

Figure 1-4, plants were set up and labeled on four different trays giving different conditions using screenings and filtration pads and papers. We first moisture the soil and filled them into the four sets of foam blocks, which each set had thirty-two small blocks. We then planted three seeds in each block along with three fertilizers and put another layer of moisture soil on top of everything. As a everyday assignment, we watered the plants that needed to be watered manually everyday using a 200mL squeeze bottle and recorded the height, quantity and size everyday. As the first leaves of each set of plants grew, we cut all the sprouts and kept the best-grown ones and kept on with the experiment to ensure the best results. At the end of the experiment, as the flowers boomed on the fourteenth day, we took a picture of each set of the plants at the same time and same position to analyses the color of each plants using Photoshop. Finally, we cut all the boomed plants and stored them in coffee filters and dried them to get the weight of the plants.

Results
Height
We measured the four randomly chosen plants from each groups and averaged them in order to get the average heights of each group of plants. The blue group that had less light and more water grew averagely 6.375 centimeters with a standard error of approximately 0.35 centimeters per group; the red group that had less light and less water grew averagely 10.05 centimeters with a standard error of approximately 1.26 centimeters per group; the orange group that had more light and more water grew averagely 19.375 centimeters with a standard error of approximately 0.91 centimeters per group; the green group that had more light and less water grew averagely 7.125 centimeters with a standard error of approximately 1.25 centimeters per group.

Figure 5: The average height of Brassica Rapa plants under given condition (with standard error) and prefer more water and more light. The orange bar represents the most water and light while the blue light represents the least water and some light.