CSU engineers, stakeholders drive salinity research effort

Irrigator Rob McClary raised his hand to speak up while Tim Gates presented the South Platte Salinity Stakeholder Group with a visualization of the salt concentration in the soil of a soybean field in eastern Colorado.

When the stakeholders group formed, this type of discussion was the goal: farmers and water managers providing real-world context to the data of researchers and scientists. Gates, Associate Professor Ryan Bailey and Professor José Chávez, all in civil and environmental engineering, and Professor Allan Andales in the CSU Department of Soil and Crop Sciences have more than $1 million in combined funding to research the growing issue of land and water salinity in Colorado’s South Platte River Basin.