For my final project, I chose to catalogue the variety of trees found on our campus with my partner, Niklas Goulet. To surmount this task we perused the current literature relating to regional speciation of trees in our area. To narrow this array of potential candidates we educated ourselves upon the different types of leaves, barks, stems, spores, and other identifying features. Although we delved into the minutiae of the variation of features, such as conifers opposed to broadleaves, we relied heavily on a brutish process of elimination. Based on the regional implications of our climate and the recorded germane trends of parallel institutions of the area we were able to easily classify the majority of the specimens under: birches, maples, pines, spruces, and elms. The outliers of these respective clades had distinct identifying features that made them available by entering keywords into websites such as Arbor Day.…show more content… It seems that Rye Country Day School manually planted a group of “designer trees”—such as the Japanese Red Maple, Weeping Fig, and Japanese Maple—primarily from Asian regions. I found this to be very interesting. Through our research we learned an immense amount about the trifles of plant anatomy which I greatly enjoyed. Especially since The College Board tends to majorly leave our plant biology from the curriculum I was glad to have chosen this topic. Apart from the specificals I learned specifically about trees, my eyes were open to the expansive variety in the trees around us. I was initially used to disregarded trees as a singular entity but now I am more fascinated by the flora I see in my day to day
