Team: 50
School: Melrose High
Area of Science: Biology/Ecology
Proposal: How Salt Cedar Population Changes Could Affect the Total Water Availability of the Pecos River.
Our team will study how salt cedar trees along the Pecos River affect the river’s ability to provide irrigation water to downstream locations. We plan on modelling how a reduction in salt cedar numbers and densities would affect water availability downstream, and we will incorporate water usage costs to determine if this thinning of tree numbers would be economically advantageous. Similar work to this has been done on the Bosque areas of the Rio Grande, and will give us a foundation on which to build our project.
We will be creating a NetLogo model that incorporates satellite data to form the basis of our project. With information about how much water a salt cedar pulls from a river, how many salt cedars there are or could potentially exist, AND with an analysis of costs for clearing salt cedar from remote locations we feel we will have enough information to make our project beneficial to anyone involved with water usage from the Pecos river.
Team Members:
Sponsoring Teacher: Alan Daugherty