fairfolio
Saved Projects

Saltbush Saves Salty Soils

CSEF · 2026 Earth & Environmental Sciences(Senior Division)

Morgan Driver

Overview

Soil salinization is a growing problem on agricultural lands, especially in the central valley of California and areas where irrigated agriculture is present. Salinization damages plant roots and decreases crop yields. My proposed solution to this problem is through the use of Atriplex lentiformis (also known as Big Saltbush), a drought tolerant plant that is known to tolerate high salinity and pH levels in the soil and is thought to remove salts from the soil. This project investigates how big saltbush affects soil salinity. This experiment was conducted with over 40 genetically identical saltbush plants split into a control group and a test group. The test group received 5 grams of dissolved salt in the first watering, then both groups were treated identically. After 25 days of measuring the salinity levels of the saltbush plants every week, the average conductivity across the plants in the test group dropped over 70% while the control group also showed a 25% decrease in salinity. These findings support the hypothesis that Atriplex can effectively reduce the salinity of the soil and could potentially be used as a method for managing salinity in agricultural lands.

Competition history

  • CSEF 2026 Earth & Environmental Sciences(Senior Division) · Entry S-08-04

Related projects

Closest projects by meaning, across every fair and year in the corpus.

Browse more like this

Source: California Science & Engineering Fair public projects

Save projects to your library

Sign in with Google to keep track of projects you find interesting, organized into folders. An account also raises your daily allowance for “Has this been done?”, and lets you create a key for the MCP server with a much higher limit than anonymous use. Browsing stays public.

Continue with Google