Student Research Reports

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Over the course of around a month, we have collected data surrounding the idea of how soil’s temperature affects its pH, which is important as global warming persists and how it could affect how people grow food and various other plants. Some sources the researchers found in our background research suggested that as the temperature increases, the pH lowers in soil. Our hypothesis for this experiment was that if the temperature of the soil increases, then the soil’s pH will decrease because of both Le Chattelier’s principle and the fact that warmer climates optimize microbial activity, and thus producing organic acids to lower the pH of the soil. To conduct this experiment, samples of soil were taken at different horizons, and measured the soil temperature and pH. Overall, our results had a general trend that as the temperature increased, the pH level decreased and vice versa. Due to this, the study can conclude that our hypothesis was supported, as a general trend that as the temperature of soil increased, the pH decreased was shown. Some further implications from this study include how these pH changes will affect plant growth in the future, as the world continues to increase in temperature.