I conducted this project as part of Professor Pringle’s EEB321 class at Princeton University.

The first thing that I saw that interested me was the ivy on the buildings. Ivy is really common across campus as it used to adorn buildings and has long carried a symbolic/spiritual significance due to its properties as an evergreen plant. I took my sample off of the Guyot building, as that is where the ivy tends to grow. The picture I captured from my foldscope was this one:


It might appear to be a stem but most of all the pieces put on the lens were from the leaf. I assume this is a very thin piece and you can glimpse some of the fibers of the leaf. I was wondering about how ivy affects environments, as it is not a native plant to the Americas, and also it seems to grow a lot, really fast which would make it an invasive plant. The university seems to do a lot of maintenance to make sure it does not spread beyond the buildings, but I do wonder what would happen in places that do not have that level of maintenance. As they do grow mainly upwards, as opposed to outwards, I feel like it would definitely affect trees, but that might also make it hard for it to spread if it is not already attached to a vertical surface. I wonder how this would affect the other plants that might come into contact with it, if it is like kudzu and would outcompete the other plants.

The second thing I looked at was dirt that I collected from the front of the Guyot building out of a small plot around a large tree. This is photo from my foldscope:




It appears to just be the very small particles of dirt, along with some water droplets due to the fact that it was raining. It is dirt from a small plot surrounded by concrete and also did seem to be composed rather hard, large granules, so I wonder if it is different from soil you might naturally find in this area. I know that soil in these plots do tend to be treated with pesticides, so maybe that might change the health or even the appearance of soil in these plots, which might affect the richness of an ecosystem in terms of which plants would be able to grow within treated soil and which cannot.