The Mead 's Milkweed Family Name Is Asclepiadaceae

The purpose of our experiment is to test animal behavior and reactions to a change in environment. Our guiding question is, “Why do living organisms respond to environmental factors?” This is basically a question that is asking why living things will react a certain way to environmental changes. The task to answer this question is to experiment with changing environmental factors with pill bugs.

- Traits such as resistance to pesticides may cause overpopulation in unfavorable plant species, such as weeds. This resistance could also be passed on to species of insects that the pesticides were made for, thus negating the effect of the pesticide in the first place.

Plants are found everywhere on earth, up high on the ridge and down low in caves and caverns. The types of plants that live in these places depends on many factors. These factors are separated into two different categories, the biotic factors and the abiotic factors. Some of the biotic factors include, predation, competition, and habitat destruction. Plants with limited competition and large amounts of resources will be in a higher abundance than plants with limited resources and higher competition rates will be confined to areas and either out competed or will be the dominant species. Certain plants adapt to these factors and thrive and others don’t do as well. Some of the abiotic factors include, sunlight, water, temperature, and wind. These

The major animals that live in the interior plains are wolves, mule deers, elks, antelopes and brown bears. These animals, with the exception of the wolves, feed on the vegetation that grow on the plains, which are mainly grasses. The native plant life in the interior plains consist mostly of different types of grasses, like blue stems, june grass and porcupine grass. The trees that grow in the plains include pine, spruce and fir

1 The U.S. Bureau of Land Management has stepped in to provide restorative practices upon 500,000 acres of heavily degraded public grasslands. This land is suffering from severe soil erosion as well as degradation due to overgrazing. The suppression of natural fires has caused shrubs and invasive weeds to encroach upon the grasslands. A full scale assessment will take place on this land before restoration efforts begin. The first thing that would need to be assessed is the soil, for it is eroding and holding little nutrient value. Samples would be taken of this soil from various parts of the grasslands including the eroded gullies. Each soil sample would be taken from at least 1 foot below the surface, to test for carbon richness below the topsoil. These would then be tested for texture, density, water retention, and chemical composition. Typically, powerful, healthy soil will contain amounts of both Nitrogen and Phosphorous, which are essential nutrients in sustainable plant growth. These samples would also be tested for any build-up of salts, something known as soil salinization. Unhealthy, salinized soil is created over years of over-hydrating and deep plowing. Excess water will suffocate root systems of once-healthy crops, and salinized soils will reduce crop output up to 20% (Withgott &Brennan, 2011). The next assessment would be in the shrubs and invasive weed species on the land. Knowing the volume and location of these plants gives way to a better understanding of

Field bindweed that grows from ½ to 1 inch below the flower has two leaf bracts. Flowering is indeterminate, so flowers will continue to develop along growing stems until first frost.

Imagine you are a young child, who had to go through your family being killed right in front of your eyes, having to remember that for the rest of your life, and having to learn how to survive with everyone around you singling you out as prey. One may need resilience in order to survive these brutalities. Resilience is when someone who is struggling with pain, but can stay positive, and still have undying hope. In the books, Milkweed by Jerry Spinelli and Night by Elie Wiesel, the two characters have to learn how to survive the inhumanities that are being committed against them. Misha and Elie both experienced many difficulties, such as trying to survive, stay positive, and have self-confidence through the torture in the ghettos during the Holocaust.

In the small farming community of Goodland, Kansas, stands the High Plains Museum. The High Plains museum offers numerous exhibits on the prairie life and the life of a Kansas homesteader throughout each era displayed. Out of all the exhibits to see, the Pioneer exhibit, the Dust Bowl Years exhibit, and the Purvis and Wilson helicopter exhibit make this museum particularly intriguing.

The story Night by Elie Wiesel is an autobiography about Elie as a young boy and his journey through the Holocaust. The story Night has similarities to a historical fiction on the Holocaust called Milkweed. The first similarity is the main character’s age range. Both of them are younger, but not exactly the same age. When Elie is put in the concentration camp, he is fifteen years old. It is unclear how old Misha, the protagonist in Milkweed, is, as there is not a specific age. However, we can assume he is about seven or eight because he makes friends with a girl who invites him to her seventh birthday. It makes sense that he would befriend someone relatively close to his age. Their similarity in age makes them more oblivious to what is going

Some of the most common bunchgrasses are basin wildrye and blue-bunch wheatgrass. They are typically found on the sloped areas. In the lower land cheatgrass and medusahead rye are invasive nonnative grasses, and must be maintained in order to preserve the native plants. Near the streams visitors will find cottonwoods, willows, alder, and hawthorn trees. Once it’s April the wildflowers begin to take bloom. In more recent years bitterroot has bloomed covering the most land. Other wildflowers found in this area are gold bee plants, prairie stars, fiddle neck and false dandelion.

The Puget Sound Prairies, are an important example of a rare and unique ecosystem, that are quickly disappearing. Their disappearance is mainly due to human development and invasive plants, specifically nonnative perennial grasses, which pose another serious threat to these prairies (Stanley, Kaye, & Dunwitti, 2008).

Then in the early 1970’s, a large seed reservoir was present and effectively cultivated a crop of spotted knapweed where the soil had once been disturbed (SCWD, n.d.). This infestation had remained unattended to until 1983, when the Stillwater Mining Company began operations. The Stillwater Mining Company began aggressive measures to control the spotted knapweed, but the weed had established itself and began spreading to adjoining private and public properties. Since then, the efforts of the Stillwater Mining Company, local land owners, Untied States Forest Service (USFS), the Stillwater Valley Watershed Council, and Stillwater County have effectively controlled the spotted knapweed in all areas except for along the river corridor (SCWD.

Examples of animals adapting to the environment have been known as far back as the case of the black peppered moths of England in the mid-1800s. In that case, entire populations of the black peppered moths were observed to change color in response to changes in their environment. More recently, bacteria have been known to develop resistance to antibiotic drugs, insects have developed various forms of resistance to insecticide, and plants have adapted to accommodate higher levels of heavy metals in the soil and water.

The desert consists of the fauna closest to the Sonoran desert; while some of its woodland consists of the Great Basin. The Mojave desert is known also for it’s unique range of elevations which are not found in any other North American deserts. The Mojave deserts biome consists of deserts and dry shrublands.

Helenium autumnale or the Sneezeweed is native to Kansas, but can be found in most of the united states. Height of the plant can reach anywhere from three to five feet and spreading two to three feet. The Sneezeweed is a flowering perennial that has one to two inch yellow flowers with ray like petals. The plant blooms late in summer and into fall. Growing conditions for the Sneezeweed are in rich, wet soils and they cannot tollerate dry soils. The Sneezeweed also needs to be grown in full sun.