 So again, my name is Tom DeSutter. I'm a faculty member in the Soul Science Department at NDSU. Thank you, Miranda, for inviting me to speak. So today I'm gonna talk a little bit about some of the work that graduate students Nick Burkheimer has done. It follows up with some work that the project that was started at the Williston Research and Extension Center in Williston. So let's go ahead and get started. So if we look at sort of the parameters of pipelines, everyone in this room knows that they can cause some soil disturbance, right? So one of the things that this project that Nick was sort of brought in on was to look at some of the parameters of soil disturbance, how to sort of remediate some of those disturbances. And so we started thinking about this quite a while ago. And we always try to think about like, how much is like, what are our boundary conditions? And so when we look at the graph on the left, we have millions or miles of pipeline that were installed basically between 2012 and 2018 in the state. And so if you think about this though, if it's a hundred foot easement, that disturbance is about six townships and size. So it's not like it's an insignificant amount, right? So from, if you're a landowner, if you're a landowner, that's quite a bit of land across the stretch of one of your fields or one of your pastures. And that's where we come in. We work for the North Dakota Agriculture Experiment Station. Our stakeholders are the farmers and the ranchers and the industry personnel of the state. And so that's where we come in with our passion and wanting to help and wanting to assist. And so we were looking at this from the standpoint of like, okay, of the disturbances that occur, whether it's a right of way or whether it's a double ditch, there's a significant amount of disturbance that occurs. Normally the top soil is pulled apart from the subsoil, but there are some things that can occur with that, right? Like mixing and compaction. And so we were kind of thinking about this from a landscape perspective of, if these are three typical soils that we might see in this side of the state, more so in the Williston area. The William soil is our state, unofficial state soil, you know, where we don't have a soil of the year anymore, but we used to, it's not Kosha. I don't think there's a soil series named Kosha, is there Mike? No, there's not one named Kosha, so that's good. But if you look at this across the landscape, the variable thickness of the top soil is evident. If we just look at the A and B horizons, you know, if you're looking up at that Wabek soil up on the summit, man, that's only like eight inches, okay? That's a lot, that's very difficult to sort of like scrape off and keep separate from the subsoil. But if you get back towards the bottom, the bull bells, that's one of our most productive soils in the state. And so, but you can tell that the depth of top soil, even though there's some carbonates in that BK horizon, 36 inches is a nice thick soil. And that is one of the reasons why it is one of our most productive soils in the state. So our job, what we always think about is like, how do we help landowners bring these soils back to productivity after they've been disturbed? And if that's the case, what are some of the metrics that cause the soils to be less productive? Okay, so that's where we started to come in. And so, if we have undisturbed soil, we have a shallow organic matter, or shallow organic matter rich A horizon. But after the separation occurs, things start to get a little more muddled up. And you can have some mixing between the subsoils and the top soils, not intentionally, not intentionally, but the folks that are doing the construction, there are limitations with the size of equipment, right? You're not out there with scrapers and doing archeological work. So there is going to be some mixing that will occur. And so we were always interested in like, how is this going to impact then crop, plant a productivity? And so Nick went through and kind of dug up all the papers that he could find that just looked at corn, just looked at corn yields. And he was looking at, so if you look at the right of way the age, I'll do a confession. Most of our studies are like between one and three years. It's not because we don't want to, it's because that's the length of the funding that we usually get. And so most master's students are here for two years. And so how many studies are done for two years? Probably 80% of them. And so that's why we don't have a lot of long-term data on some of these sites. But if you look at Xi et al, even after eight years of the productivity was decreased by almost 40% yet on that right of way. And so that's an indication to us that whatever happens on the front end is usually going to be carried over for years and years and years. So that's where we try to think about is like, okay, how does, how the soil gets handled, how it gets moved, how it gets stored. And so if we think about this Austin Link, who is at the Williston Research and Extension Center quite a few years ago, he got a sizable amount of money from the oil and gas research program. We're very thankful for that. And we started a six-year study. And so what we were looking at was different cropping sequences that would occur or that are kind of common in the region itself. And so we had these four unique cropping sequences. The sequence one just being Durham every year, Durham P's, you can read down the list. And then the last two years we kept everything the same, just so we could say, okay, we can compare apples and apples and oranges and oranges throughout those last two years. And so if we just look at the differences where those disturbances occur and over the undisturbed area, you can notice everything, a lot of it sort of shifts below one. And that just means that there's the relative differences is that there's a decrease in yield over the pipeline than there is with the undisturbed area. And so, but it's a lot more evident when you look at the roadway where all the traffic was sort of moving. And so we were interested in this from a standpoint of like, okay, what are all the parameters that caused this to occur? And so one of the things that we know happens is that we tend to get a fair bit of compaction. And this is based a lot on what the water content is when the actual traffic ability, when the traffic does occur. So if we look at this, you have soil compaction, you can see that compacted layer. You can see in the middle here, some sort of columnar type structure. I've seen this in our side of the state too. It's more like my fingers they would be, but it's more based on the compression of the soil than any sodic or sodium that might be occurring in those soils. But if we look at some of the pictures, so Sam Crow had taken these for us, you can see where that compaction really starts to shape up. And you can see if we look at some of the roots that Nick extracted, the undisturbed, the roadway versus the pipeline, okay? There's no reason to wonder why we see yield reductions over the roadway more so than we would over the pipeline. The pipeline's pretty narrow, right? I mean, it's not huge. And it's not like the pipeline is getting driven on a lot. It's more about the roadway side. And so oftentimes what we'll see is we'll see the yields above the pipeline be greater for a few years than the undisturbed. And the reason is is that you're mixing, you're aerating, you're having a lot of nutrient cycling. So you have this flush of nutrients that does occur. You can look up and down the Red River Valley where tall drainage is put in and you'll see weeds dominating over those pipelines. It's a perfect environment for weeds to inhabit. There's aeration, there's water and there's nutrients and they love it. So it's an easy translation to go from here to what we see across the state. But what happens is, so this is alfalfa, which is we consider to be one of our more tough plants, but you can see that the root takes a 90 degree turn once it hits that compacted layer. And so what we don't wanna see is people farming six inches of soil. We want them to see farming 18 to 24 inches of soil. And so that's where our study sorta started. I'm not gonna talk more about that study in itself right now, but what I wanna go to though is a little bit of what we've seen in the field. And if we look here, we have on the y-axis, we have depth below the soil surface. If on the x-axis, we have what's called the penetration resistance. That's like taking a cone penetrometer and pushing it into the soil. And once it reaches about 300 PSI, that's where roots really tend to stop growing. And so we kind of use that 300 PSI as a cutoff. But it's pretty evident to see over the roadway that you hit 300 PSI pretty quick right below the soil surface. And so that's one of the other reasons why we see all this, we see a reduction in plant growth. Okay, so for Nick, for part of his thesis, he wanted to do a meta-analysis, I should back up, would you say he wanted to or did I say that? I told him to, yeah, yeah, okay. To do a meta-analysis on all the disturbances that we could find with well-pads, with pipelines. And let's just look at it from a broad perspective and see where in fact, all the parameters that we normally measure and let's see where those fall out. So Nick spent a lot of time on this, I could say a lot of time, but I want him to graduate, so I don't wanna drag it on too much. But he ended up finding about, he did this in, we have these databases where you can search for papers and things like that. And so he ended up finding like 271 papers that mentioned soil and compaction and things of that nature. He dwindled it down to basically 27. They had to have papers that had at least greater or equal than one soil property on or off the reclaimed right-of-way. And he wanted to make sure that they had a variance, they had a mean and then they had a variance. Because what he did was he used a statistical model then to pool all the data together and sort of flush out when in fact, the parameter was being positively impacted or being negatively impacted. And so let's walk through a few of these. These are all the parameters that Nick looked at. And so we have everything from bulk density to pH, total nitrogen, phosphorus, magnesium. And on the right-hand side, that's the number of observations that for each of those parameters he was able to find. And I was kind of surprised that there wasn't more research done in this field. Most of it was actually done in Canada in Saskatchewan. And our friends in Wyoming have done a lot of this work as well. So Kayleigh Gash, who's my colleague, her PhD work is also highlighted in Nick's meta-analysis as well. So let's just look at bulk density. So I'm gonna set these up because we have a few of these and they all sort of look the same. On the left, you have the authors. In the middle, you have the standardized mean difference. And those are the two I really want you to look at. If in fact, in this case, bulk density, zero meaning that there was no change at all. If it's above zero, that means there was an increase in bulk density across all of these papers. And so on average, across all these papers, bulk density increased 23% of the time. And so we ended up seeing a lot of papers, a lot of evidence, not just here, but everywhere, that bulk density and the compaction of soil is a major issue, okay? And I guess that moved by itself. And so let's look at pH. And so pH was sort of like so-so. Where does, how does pH controlled? Most of the time in our arid regions, the concentration of calcium carbonate, the lime, the white stuff you see in the soil, that's what controls the pH. Most soils that have lime in them or calcium carbonate have a pH between 7.8 and 8.2. If plants are adapted to that, no problem. If it's an agronomic field, you might start seeing problems with phosphorus deficiency because phosphorus likes to precipitate out when the pH gets above 7.8 and it precipitates with that calcium. So something to think about. But basically the mean increase was about 12%, okay? We've talked a lot about this already. Our panelists today really brought it out very nicely. Organic matter, how do you get and keep organic matter in the soil? Remember when we showed that picture with the soils and they were being mixed? Well, when that soil gets mixed, you dilute out the organic matter. And that organic matter is what really drives a lot of the plant productivity and plant responses. And so what we saw was 31 observations, there was a mean decrease of 10%. And so part of what the panelists were talking this morning was like, how do you get that organic matter revitalized? And there's a good reason for it is because there's generally a loss of organic matter. You aerate the soil, the microbes start to kick in a little bit, they oxidize, a lot of that carbon, your carbon then decreases. And so the electrical conductivity jumps up to the next slide. And so some of those things are what we sort of focus on. Everything again that we think of is water conservation, organic matter, keeping the pH moderated, reducing bulk density. And the last one that we spent a lot of time thinking about is electrical conductivity. The soluble solid concentration in the soil greatly, greatly drives species diversity and species response. And so all plants have some tolerance level to soluble salts. The plants that you may need in your right of way or on your well pad may not respond well to high concentration of salts. By mixing the soil, oftentimes you'll bring those salts up into that top soil region where then by you will negatively impact that plant growth. And you can see there was a mean increase of 634% across all the papers that we were able to find in soil electrical conductivity. So this is good evidence that there is some serious mixing going on. And I think it really highlights in those fragile areas where you know salinity is an issue is to be exceptionally careful of how much top soil is pulled off making sure that you don't pull in a lot of that subsoil into that top soil. And I think a lot of the right of way you can think about is being a long distance, but it might be areas that you identify, bring out a soil scientist, bring out an electromagnetic survey, check where those areas are. If those areas are highly sensitive or that salinity level is close to the surface right in the subsoil, maybe you have to manage that a little bit differently. And I think that's a fair way of thinking about how to keep that salt content as low as possible. Calcium, calcium would come from the calcium carbonate or from the calcium sulfate. So gypsum is a naturally occurring mineral. Lime is a net naturally occurring mineral. Because of the mixing that you would get, you oftentimes see this big increase in calcium. Calcium is needed by plants for cell strength. And so it's not a bad thing to have. It's just that it actually comes with probably the calcium carbonate, which then drives the pH increases maybe to a level that you're not that terribly wanting to have. So some of our things that didn't have a lot of conclusion with them, soil texture. Yeah, there was some mixing, but it didn't, nothing really fell out. Total nitrogen, cation exchange capacity is tied greatly with organic matter and with the clay content. Because we didn't see anything with the clay content, it doesn't surprising that we didn't see anything with the cation exchange capacity. And then the other ones are phosphorus and magnesium. I think a good point that was brought up this morning was that in native range lands, using fertility as a tool is not an option. We know what's gonna happen, you're gonna get weeds. And so some dilution of the topsoil may actually keep some of the weeds from going away, but it might also keep some of the desirable species from being able to habitat as well. So I think when we think about the pipeline and remediation, whether it's cropland or whether it's range land, have two different sort of cases. In the cropland, we're gonna manage and put nitrogen on and phosphorus on anyway, but in the range land, I don't think that's something that you wanna be known for is you put a lot of nitrogen on those areas. So all right, so management practices to limit impact. So these are some of the things that Nick concluded. Reclamation done while soil water content is low will limit increases in bulk density. I'm gonna show you a figure in a few slides here or maybe the next slide that will highlight that a little more. If you have enough water, things will be okay. I always, so I grew up in Iowa, the great state of Iowa, and they get 30 to 45 inches of rain per year depending on where you live. You would not see the same issues here if you had 30 or 45 inches of rain, flat out. But we're not in an area that gets 30 to 45 inches of rain. If you do, you're probably swimming in your basement. But that being said, we do have to take advantage of the water when we get it. Capturing snow isn't actually a very good way of getting extra water on the landscape. Incorporating short-term and long-term organic carbon sources. So we talked about this this morning a little bit was about the introduction bringing in organic carbon. Yield responses are directly tied to the concentration of organic matter in the soils, plain and simple. The more organic matter you have to a certain level, that will produce the maximum yield for those soils and for that condition. And so being cognizant of the fact of that that's a driver that will help as well. So okay, so I wanna show some data that Jared Lardy who's gonna be speaking next, he's not gonna present on this data, so what we were always wondering about, okay, you have different soil textures, if you have different water contents and you compress them, like you physically compress them, and then you say, okay, what would a root feel? Like how would the root feel going through that? And that's that the penetration resistance that we're talking about. And so we have apparatus that we can do this. And so what Jared was doing was he was bringing soils to a certain water content. He was compressing them, and then he was using the cone penetrometer to see how much force it would take to go through. Again, if we think that roots about 300 PSI is about the maximum that they can do. So if we look at the graph, notice that Nick has got 12% water content, 15% and 17%. What's interesting is that, even though point number one is you have a high bulk density, he was able to compress that pretty well. Normally we think of like a bulk density of 1.6 is like pretty much the maximum that roots and earthworms can stand. But what's interesting though, is that basically he stayed under the 300 PSI. So when the soil was wet, it was compacted, but the roots were still able to move through it, which I think is a pretty good indication that you can't just assume one thing, because we looked at this data and we're like, oh man, this is a lot different than we thought it would look like. And so if you look at the dry end, if you look at the dry end, 12% water is not very much, but he could barely get that bulk density from here up to 1.6. So doing construction work on dry soils is actually a better than doing construction work on a soil that is moderately wet. Why? Because on those dry soils, those, if there's not water, those particles can't slide by each other and compress. They're dry. There's no water between them. So that acts more like a sand where you can drive on it, where you're not gonna compress a sand very much. So we thought, I think this is pretty interesting. He's got seven soils total. And so this is just an example of one of the soils we collected out west. And notice though, there's a fair bit of sand to this, right? So Jared actually got, we looked at the textual triangle. We tried to pick soils that were across the textual triangle to even out the, what we think is happening. So okay, so areas of further research, this will probably go through by itself. We actually think that if in cropped fields, what we kind of wanna try now is managing the fertility. The deep ripping didn't work as well as we hoped it would, but we did notice that if you can get things established right away when you have spring water, it's gonna probably carry through for the rest of the year. So do we need to think more about our fertility management in these situations than we do sort of like the deep ripping part? And so that's what we think is gonna be an important part of the next concepts that we do. Being cognizant of the fact that we're not, we don't wanna do this on range land and have weeds become a major issue because then we gotta call Quincy and he's gonna have a new weed of the year, which is something that we introduced. And then the, so basically can the texture, texture is almost impossible to change. It's one of those parameters you just can't do unless you do too much mixing. And so how does this relate to the water content? Well, because I have a little extra time. One of the things that if where we're going with a lot of our research is we wanna manufacture soils. We wanna create what's called a technosol. So in areas that have very little topsoil for sale or available, can we actually manufacture our own topsoils to get us through the first three to five years? And then plant productivity will take over after that. And so these are common in hard rock mining where they put a cap on some of the mining activities. But you always have to start with the correct texture of soil. And so if you started with a sandy soil, what this figure shows you is that, so this is the volume of soil water versus on bottom here you have varying textures. Sand soils have very, very little available water. And that's why there's some of the most difficult to bring back to life after a disturbance is because you can't store enough water for a long period of time. But if you identify soils that are kind of in that loam to silt loam area, that's the sweet spot. Some of the most productive soils in the world are silt loams. If you go to Southwest Kansas, the Huketon silt loam is one of the most productive soils in the world. And there's a reason for that is because it hits that texture perfectly. And that's one of the things that we wanna start with is start with the right texture and it could be subsoils, start with the right texture and then start adding organic matter in there to try to add the organic matter to increase the nutrient cycling, to increase microbial activity, to increase plant response, okay. So that's the whole bigger picture where we're going and when we get there, I don't know. But I guarantee you it'll be a two-year study because that's a master's, it's a two-year, so.