Hi, guys! Over the next couple of weeks, I will be composing a series on brainstorming ideas for a dissertation, but I wanted to kick things off by sharing what my dissertation work looks like! It can be hard to conceptualize the level of work you should be completing for a dissertation, so I wanted to share mine to help give you guys a realistic starting point.
My Interests:
My dissertation work has been following me for the last year, so it was really important to me to choose a topic that I cared about. I know that I am a big “plant person” which means that I would rather do an ecology or phytology based study rather something like hydrology or climatology. Though I also wouldn’t mind having a corporate job, I wanted to take this opportunity at university to work in the field and in the lab. Since my degree concerns both geography and environmental science, I also wanted to choose a topic that had some sort of concern with human issues in some way. I eventually landed on an edaphological study looking at the effects of plants on soil remediation in London’s parks!
My Methodology:
My methodology mainly consists of field, lab, and data analysis, but it is a totally realistic workload to also add in a spatial data science, mapping, modeling, or surveying aspect to your own dissertation. In the field, I collected 80 total soil samples from vegetated and unvegetated areas in 4 different brownfield parks in London. I did this with emailed permission from all of the parks which is pretty easy to obtain for things like soil and water, but harder if you are thinking of working with plant matter. I then took these samples back to my university’s lab to be dried out for two days in an oven. After they were dry, I spent a day grinding and sieving all of the samples to homogenize them and get them ready for testing. I was specifically looking at heavy metal content in the soil so I used an XRF to measure this. While the XRF was running, I also measured the pH of the samples. After a few weeks in the field and lab, I had all of my data which I ran statistical tests on in Excel and SPSS. These tests were to compare the differences in heavy metal content between the vegetation levels and also to compare the data to other known standards.
My Discussion:
I used my findings for comparison to similar studies and standards where I found some abnormally high levels of heavy metal. This suggests that ingesting the soil in these areas could pose health issues for children and animals. This means that these parks may need other forms of clean-up or more thorough active management. These findings also suggest that phytoremediation, or using plants to clean soils, might not be as effective in-situ, in actual park, than it is ex-situ, in the lab, like many previous studies have tested.
My Conclusion:
These findings leave me to suggest that greater care needs to be taken in these parks to make sure that they are safe for all residents. I also suggest that my study is repeated in other brownfield parks to see if there truly is any potential for the power of phytoremediation in practice.
