#Stick particle particle playground download#

Another example would be planting a row of trees between a school playground and a busy road. The main reason that trees are beneficial in city air choked with pollution is that they act as physical barriers that block the pollutants from reaching people, just like Kieron’s cherry laurel. But what about all the rest of this sooty stuff? ‘They’re so small you can almost think of them as gases,’ he says. As Kieron explains, trees do take up some of the very smallest particles through their stomata. Recent studies have even linked ultra-fine particles to brain health in diseases such as dementia, although a lot more research is needed to understand the possible mechanisms. There are also ultra-fine particles smaller than 0.2 μm whose effects we know less about. There are two main types: PM 10 (particles smaller than 10 μm, or micrometres, about the same size as dust mite poo) and PM 2.5 (particles smaller than 2.5 μm). PM can be solid or liquid and can come from car engines, building sites, fires and a whole range of other sources. ‘I planted a cherry laurel, a really thick, bushy and quick-growing bush in my front garden, to act as a barrier and when I used to clip it I used to wear gloves because hands would get caked in the residue.’ ‘I used to live on a very busy road and I could see the particulate matter deposited on my windowsill,’ he says. Kieron Doick is head of the Urban Forest Research Group at Forest Research in Surrey, and he’s seen the effects of particle pollution in his own back yard, or rather front garden. Trees also reduce the effects of PM – particles made from a mixture of different chemicals and soot that clog up the air, causing heart and lung disease. In the case of O 3, the tree suffers damage by chemical oxidation or ‘burning’ of plant tissue. These two gases are absorbed through the same pores (stomata) that trees use to inhale CO 2. So what do the trees lining your street and in your local green spaces do for you? Well, apart from soaking up CO 2, they shield us from some of the impacts of local air pollutants, including ozone (O 3) and NO 2. It’s the balance between these global and local benefits of trees that makes them indispensable for the protection of our planet and our health. And that’s not always a bad thing, because the quality of the air we breathe is also directly connected to the trees closest to us. We might be more concerned with the trees in our local parks and school yards. It takes a disaster in the Amazon – like the 2019 surge in wildfires – to make us worry about what it all means for us. But that doesn’t mean it’s easy to envisage how we in the UK, for example, might benefit from the trees in Brazil. Greenhouse gases circulate at a global level, so we’re all party to the climate-regulating benefits of trees, wherever they are. It can be difficult to find appropriate data sets to use with students and this activity presents students with a real data set and prompts them to look at calculations of mean and range, and representing data in graphs and charts.

#Stick particle particle playground download#

Read through the article with your class and use the data analysis download to practise skills in data handling. It makes a useful addition to lessons on atmospheric chemistry and pollution as well as the carbon cycle and plant science. This article reminds them of the local impact of tree populations and of their global significance. Students find plants one of the less interesting parts of the biology curriculum, perhaps because they don’t see the immediate relevance to their own lives. This article sits nicely at the boundary between chemistry and biology and is certainly one to share with colleagues who teach plant science.