Site Visit to Saul Agricultural High School

On Wednesday, April 8, Dr. Sales, Jake, and Tommy with Dr. Stefanie Kroll from the Academy of Natural Sciences visited the Walter Biddle Saul High School of Agricultural Sciences.  The school is a magnet school in the Roxborough neighborhood of the city.  The purpose of the visit was to collect soil and water samples from the farmland and ponds for DNA extraction and sequencing.  Some photos of the site are given below.

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Top-Left: An overview shot of the land with some dairy cows watching us back.
Bottom-Left: Numerous rows of various crops planted in the soil.  Nine soil samples were taken beyond these fields for soil bacterial composition analysis and comparison.
Top-Right: One of the small ponds that exist on the site.  Water samples were taken from this pond as well as two others for comparison.
Bottom-Right: The very large pile of composting manure from on-site farm animals as well as some farm animal residents of the Philadelphia Zoo.  A sample of leachate (partially seen in a puddle towards the left side of the photo) was taken and analyzed as a soil sample as well.

 

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About Thomas Thompson

Thomas "Tommy" Thompson is a Drexel Junior studying Environmental Engineering and pursuing his BS/MS in the field. He also has a Minor in Ecology and is spending his third and final Co-op working primarily with algae kinetics in Dr. Sales' lab under Jake Price. Tommy currently maintains the Sales Laboratory website.