mary-anne-poyitt

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Maryanne Poyitt: Hi I’m Maryanne Poyitt and I’m in Year 10 at Redeemer Baptist School.

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For my project I was looking at native plant species in Lake Parramatta Reserve

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 in relation to the creek where they were found.

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I also took soil samples, slope heights and heights of the trees to try and figure out what determined where each plant was found.  

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I set out to do this project because my  

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brother has to maintain and regenerate a Riparian corridor, which is a strip of bushland on the back of my school property. I’m really interested in biology; I wanted to do an investigation to do with it. I wanted to work out what plants he should be planting and where

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to try and make his job easier and so that it would last.

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The core beneficiaries for my research would be people who have to regenerate bushland, even landscapers.  There’s a great deal of work going on around Sydney right now where they’re re-vegetating areas so they would benefit a lot from what I have found.

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In my investigation I didn’t have many problems in my research; the problems came mainly when I was doing my graphs.

To do my transect graphs I had to combine line and scatter graphs. In order to show the tree height I also then had to add the slope height that it was on so that was very time consuming to do it for all ten transects.

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As a child I always enjoyed going for bush walks with my dad and so that sort of probably sparked my curiosity in biology.

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I’ve also always really enjoyed reading and studying so this project has been really beneficial to me. I love the way science and engineering incorporate maths and other subjects into it and there’s so many different areas that you can look at.

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In my spare time I play some tennis with my friends and I really enjoy reading.

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In the future I hope improvements in science will be able to come up with more medical treatments

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such as for Malaria, which has no cure right now and I know a few people who suffer from it in a remote village in Papua New Guinea which my school has a lot to do with.

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I really enjoy biology so whether that takes me to a medical career or

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 to be an enthusiastic teacher, I would love it, or even the opportunity to further my findings.

[Music plays and text appears: BHP Billiton Science and Engineering Awards 2017]

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