Browse real student projects, abstracts, and awards.
ISEF · 2025
Earth and Environmental Sciences
Columnar jointing is a well-known feature of frozen magma flows. World-famous examples include the UNESCO world heritage site, the Giant's Causeway, UK. Columnar jointing can be divided into…
ISEF · 2025
Earth and Environmental Sciences
While climate change's environmental impacts are well recognized, its humanitarian impacts depend on complex interactions between climate and population factors. This study simulated land-us…
ISEF · 2025
Earth and Environmental Sciences
CO2 emissions are a critical global concern, particularly in urban and industrialized regions. Effective tracking of CO2 plumes is essential for understanding climate impacts and managing ai…
ISEF · 2025
Earth and Environmental Sciences
Climate changes that include ocean acidification and global warming are serious problems in the ecosystem, affecting marine phytoplankton, including Nannochloropsis oceanica. In the effort t…
ISEF · 2025
Earth and Environmental Sciences
Climate change comes in many forms, sometimes from unexpected sources. Manure management facilities are some of the most overlooked, yet consequential facilitators of climate change, contrib…
ISEF · 2025
Earth and Environmental Sciences
Schistocerca gregaria (desert locust) is the world's most destructive migratory pest and a serious threat to food security. Existing locust-control tools use real-time field data to monitor…
ISEF · 2025
Earth and Environmental Sciences
Coral reefs stand as the ocean's last line of defense, a living barrier vital to the marine ecosystem, supporting approximately 25% of its biodiversity, and providing additional benefits to…
ISEF · 2025
Earth and Environmental Sciences
The large amounts of CO2 generated by human activities results in an increase in ocean acidity on a global scale (Hill, 2018). The ability to determine long-term open ocean acidification tre…
ISEF · 2025
Earth and Environmental Sciences
Melatonin made by insects and plants regulates growth and development. Ecdysteroids like 20-hydroxyecdysone (20E) promote maturation, molting and butterfly emergence through oxidative stress…
ISEF · 2025
Earth and Environmental Sciences
Mycorrhizal fungi establish underground networks that form symbiotic relationships with almost all plant species and facilitate crucial ecological processes, but habitat degradation is their…
ISEF · 2025
Earth and Environmental Sciences
Coastal erosion costs around $500 million per year due to damages to essential infrastructure (NOAA, 2025). Scientists have explored nature-based solutions to coastal erosion, specifically t…
ISEF · 2025
Earth and Environmental Sciences
This study describes a novel species of snail in the genus Japonia (subfamily Cyclophoridae, family Cyclophoridae) discovered in Hong Kong. This species is distinguished by unique long, spoo…
ISEF · 2025
Earth and Environmental Sciences
Lake-effect precipitation, which significantly impacts regions downwind of the Great Lakes, poses unique forecasting challenges due to its dependence on localized processes and intricate int…
ISEF · 2025
Earth and Environmental Sciences
Heavy metal contamination in water poses a significant threat to human health and the environment. Effective detection of heavy metals is crucial for the prompt removal of contamination sour…
ISEF · 2025
Earth and Environmental Sciences
In 2024, over 10,000 tons of oil were spilled into the ocean, damaging the environment and costing billions of dollars in mitigation efforts. This project is a continuation of previous resea…
ISEF · 2025
Earth and Environmental Sciences
The researchers conducted experiments using Pestalotiopsis microspora and Pleurotus pulmonarius creating a non-toxic biodegradable process for decomposing plastic. P. microspora is a fungus…
ISEF · 2025
Earth and Environmental Sciences
The spotted lanternfly (SLF), Lycorma delicatula, is an invasive planthopper species that feeds on a wide variety of plant hosts, causing an estimated $3 billion in damages in the United Sta…
ISEF · 2025
Earth and Environmental Sciences
Caffeine, a prevalent compound in human wastewater, has emerged as a reliable anthropogenic biomarker for detecting septic tank contamination in aquatic systems due to its minimal natural oc…
ISEF · 2025
Earth and Environmental Sciences
Microplastics, degraded from plastic products, have become a pervasive pollutant that severely impacts marine ecosystems and public health. This issue is especially critical in Hawaii, where…
ISEF · 2025
Earth and Environmental Sciences
The widespread use of synthetic surfactants in household detergents pose major environmental risks due to chemical persistence of non-biodegradable petrochemicals in ecosystems. However, Sap…
ISEF · 2025
Earth and Environmental Sciences
This study compares the performance of four different soil testers to see the most accurate and reliable device for measuring soil. The experiment tests the sensors on three types of soil, s…
ISEF · 2025
Earth and Environmental Sciences
Mars' current surface preserves a geological record for its mineralogical processes, with volcanism once being the primary source of sulfur transport. However, there is a mismatch between th…
ISEF · 2025
Earth and Environmental Sciences
Anthropogenic methane (CH4) emissions cause roughly 700,000 premature deaths annually; moreover, CH4 is difficult to monitor and predict. Existing methods lack the predictive accuracy and re…
ISEF · 2025
Earth and Environmental Sciences
Biodiversity is essential for ecosystem health and stability. Though springtails are widely accepted as decomposers, recent studies suggest they may also be keystone organisms. Since native…
ISEF · 2025
Earth and Environmental Sciences
Coral reef ecosystems are rapidly deteriorating as they endure global threats leading to negative economic impacts, loss of cultural understanding and a decrease in habitat and biodiversity.…
ISEF · 2025
Earth and Environmental Sciences
The chemical class, Per- and Polyfluoroalkyl Substances (PFAS), first used in the 1940s for ScotchgardTM and TelfonTM has grown to be a chemical class of 12,039 variants. Recently, health co…
ISEF · 2025
Earth and Environmental Sciences
My project focused on the effect of fire mitigation on avian biodiversity as measured through bioacoustics, to ultimately understand forest health. It was inspired by the controversy that oc…
ISEF · 2025
Earth and Environmental Sciences
Acres burned by U.S wildfires have increased since the 1980s, due to warmer temperatures. Over 7 million acres have burned per year in the past 20 years (NOAA). Wildfire plays an integral ro…
ISEF · 2025
Earth and Environmental Sciences
Tornadoes have various wind speeds throughout their life cycles and are usually warned by the National Weather Service to protect life and property. I analyzed data on select tornadoes (2011…
ISEF · 2025
Earth and Environmental Sciences
Approximately 3.5 million people die annually due to inadequate water resources. More than 90% of pollution-related deaths occurred in low-income and middle-income countries. Although resear…