Soil

Welcome to the UWyo STEM Carnival! We taught lots of kids about dirt and leaves😁

Hannah dug up the root balls (the densest part of the root mass, near the surface) of these three plants. Can you tell which plant is Kernza, wheat, and wild-type intermediate wheatgrass?

This week, Hannah sampled the rhizosphere soil from wheat, Kernza, and unbred intermediate wheatgrass, to look for differences in their microbial communities. The RHIZOSPHERE is the zone right next to plant roots, and it can house 100x more microbes than the rest of the soil!

Soil color can tell us a lot about what going on down there (black for organic matter, red & yellow for iron, white for calcium carbonate…) We dug pits for a research project looking at high-elevation hay meadows and thought about how deep-rooted perennial grasses (like Kernza 🌾!