Roots or Water?

Overview

Last year in Southern California, multiple fires damaged many cities. These cities are now experiencing mudslides and erosion whenever it rains. As a Southern California resident, I saw a need to find a solution to stop erosion using plants or other garden materials. I created an experiment to simulate erosion using bread pans, soil, rocks, rubber mulch, various ground-covering plants, a kitchen scale, and a hose. To preform my experiment I first put each of the different variables (rocks, mulch, and plants) into their own bread pan, then I carefully measured out an angle that I could recreate for each separate experiment to simulate a hillside that would show a mudslide/erosion effect with water, I then used a hose on the light setting to simulate light rain and then again on the heavy setting to simulate heavy rain, I measured the runoff by weight in between each set of experiments. I found that the Korean Grass stopped the most dirt runoff in the hard rain simulation, while the Isotoma Blue stopped the most during the light rain simulation. This shows that planting ground-covering plants with thick roots on hillsides prone to erosion would help prevent further mudslides and erosion damage.

Competition history

• CSEF 2026 Earth & Environmental Sciences (Track 2) (Junior Division) · Entry J-09-02

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