This project will involve one or two  afternoons collecting soils from throughout the Garden grounds, and the remainder of the time processing collected soil in the Garden's soils lab. The goal is to assess how saline our soils are, with a particular focus on the areas where the Garden uses ice melt (calcium chloride) during the winter in heavily visited in the winter. Because of the many negative impacts of saline soils on plants, the Garden only uses ice melt when necessary, and even then only sparingly. However, it is possible that even this low application amount is changing the salinity of our soils over multiple years. This project will provide a baseline measurement of soil salinity throughout the Garden, and we expect that this assessment will be repeated every few years to assess how salinity changes over time.

(Note: photo of salt on sidewalk from https://fyi.extension.wisc.edu/wwhort/2015/12/21/de-icing-salts-and-landscapes-dont-mix/)