 As she said, my name is Jared Lardy and I'm currently a master's student at North Dakota State where I've been studying soil science and I'll be presenting on methods for reducing runoff erosion and increasing plant establishment for these pipeline right-of-ways. This might sound pretty familiar as a lot of what we've talked about is going to overlap with a lot of what we've been discussing today, namely with the drought that we've been experiencing. So here in the U.S. and globally a lot of our energy consumption relies heavily on fossil fuels things like oil and natural gas and petroleum. Globally number one and two are oil and coal but then in the United States here we transition into a use of natural gas where petroleum and oil or petroleum and natural gas dominate the industry making up over 70% of our consumption. This domination with natural gas moving in versus coal leads to a lot of infrastructure development specifically pipelines transport all this natural gas to various refineries and suck and as a result those areas where natural gas and oil are found often see booms like here in North Dakota. We've been seeing one experiencing a boom since about 2006 and this has resulted in North Dakota becoming the second largest domestic oil producing state only behind Texas as of 2012 and then seeing record production levels at 524 million barrels of oil annually in 2019. Production did drop off with the pandemic but is expected to uptick with various economic factors happening at the moment. This requires an immense amount of infrastructure to be built with all this production and in western North Dakota that centers around the Bakken and 34x formations. Each one of these hexagons is 20 square miles and that density only increases as you get towards the center of those formations where oil and natural gas are found. Here in North Dakota there are currently over 17,000 active wellheads in the state and since 2006 that's an increase of over 14,000 wellheads. In order to transport natural gas that's produced at these locations nearly 30,000 miles of pipeline exists in North Dakota alone and the construction of these pipelines is incredibly important because it allows the flaring that occurs to then be captured as that flaring is harmful to the atmosphere but also it's a loss to that producer. They want to capture that natural gas as quickly as possible so they can make money on the back end as well. The process for building these pipelines as we've been talking about is incredibly invasive. Initially that topsoil is stripped and stockpiled to the side with that dark material being the topsoil on the left hand and then the subsequent subsoil is also stripped and stockpiled. As we mentioned this creates an opportunity for a lot of that topsoil and subsoil mixing and you see a depletion or a loss to that topsoil where a lot of plant establishment is limited mainly because the nutrients and organic matter are just not there anymore and then compaction is also a major issue as this pipeline is eventually laid within that trench. All that machinery compacts that soil which also reduces plant establishment as those seeds are trying to germinate. If that compaction is just too high it cannot break through that surface and get to the surface and access water that it needs. So then some of our challenges that we've been facing a lot of it is that compaction and topsoil mixing but also the lack of plant establishment as these plants continue to suffer. This sees a lot of invasive species moving in things like Kentucky bluegrass, smooth brome, keepgrass and other parts of the world and crested wheatgrass and all these problems when plant establishment suffers you see a lot of increases in erosion and a lot of more loss of that topsoil as time goes on. This forces companies to come in and receive these rideaways multiple times three or four times depending on the severity of some of these problems and obviously that costs some money but more importantly that costs these rideaways a lot of time as time is really valuable to this whole process. So that led us to ask ourselves a few things we wanted to know if there was a method out there which could reduce runoff as well as erosion because that runoff is important to that initial seed germination and we were interested in that erosion as that's a loss of topsoil which is necessary for a lot of that germination as well. We then wanted to know if any of these methods that we were going to be testing also aided plant establishment outside of the rainfall simulation that we were going to be conducting and so we ended up testing four methods with the control and the first one we have here is called land imprinting and land imprinting uses what we call the imprimter to create these pox on the landscape and so that creates a rough environment for things like seed sediment plant material and water to collect in the bottom of those imprints and the ideas behind that is that those imprints are v-shaped to bring all that down to the bottom and that is supposed to increase the germination success of these rideaways. One thing with these is that they've only been tested in arid environments and we had we were one of the first ones at least that we found in the literature to test it at the Williston Research Center. The next method we tested was using a wood fiber hydromolch. The wood fiber hydromolch creates a seal on the surface where it limits that of apotranspiration especially in the hot summer months that North Dakota experiences and what that does is it saves water from being lost to evaporation but as a result of that seal it also increases the runoffs that we've been seeing. This hydromolch also as a result of that seal keeps sediment within the right away and seed which is important for that germination too. One thing to note with this hydromolch is that it requires a lot of manpower and water. Installing these plots it took a lot to maneuver that around and we needed a thousand gallons in that tank for three of our plots each each one needing a thousand gallons and moving that around it could be cumbersome in a lot of different environments that a lot of these pipelines go in. Our next method that we tested was straw crimping. Initially what we did was blow straw bale across the right away and then crimped it into the soil surface and so what that ended up doing was mimicking barley residue and so that stands up on its end and it provides a path for that water to go down into the soil rather than being lost left and right during those heavy runoff events that our study area sometimes sees. The straw also acts as a carbon source for some of our regular ways which is important for some microbiology, microbiologic activity. Lastly we tested the combination of imprinting with hydromolch. As we talked about with the hydromolch that increases runoff which can be a problem if we're trying to capture some of that and improve that termination success and so combining that with that imprinting to catch some of that we thought we would be able to see a combined effect and hopefully an improvement on some of our right aways and then lastly for our control we just tilled everything up as a right away may look post construction and so what we ended up doing was using a strip plot design at the Williston Research Center and the strip plot design allowed us to test two percent slopes along the tops of each of these blocks and then five percent slopes along the bottoms and Williston, North Dakota is a semi-arid region. Williston usually gets about 13 inches of rain annually but in 2020 we saw four and a half inches of rain and then in 2021 we saw seven and a half nearly a half of what we get each year and both of those years were D2 and D3 droughts for the entirety of the study. We then also to test that plant establishment variable we broadcast seeded oats, side oats, grama, slender wheatgrass and western wheatgrass and that native seed mix minus the oats is from the North Dakota state trust lands and that's a common seed mix on some of our right aways that when a contract may not specifically recommend a specific seed mix and so we figured just testing a general seed mix would be what we want and then testing our runoff and erosion parameters we use rainfall simulation applying 50 gallons of rain to each individual plot for a duration of 30 minutes which ended up simulating a one and 25 year rainfall event and we conducted two simulations we did one in September of 2020 and then June of 2021 showing how those treatments behave over time but also because that is some of the most common rainfall months that Williston gets and then once we got back to the lab we had all the total runoffs that we had for each plot and we multiplied that out using our three foot by six foot plot that we had and came up with an equivalent depth for each runoff plot that we had for our sediment load or our erosion we took sub samples of that runoff and we brought that back to the lab and had 30 mil subsamples and then we expanded that to equate for the total amount of runoffs that we had so that it was a ratio of grams per liter and then we dried that all down so that we could get our sediment parameter lastly we had a few issues with our plant establishment outside of the drought we had a lot of weedy species come in but also we had some miscommunication with our folks at the WREC and our we were hoping to get some biomass samples but they ended up swathing it before we could get there so what we ended up doing was estimating cover using Gopinamire frames and we ended up analyzing that cover with all species just to ensure that we're capturing all the cover rather than guessing at what plant species may have been present because in the end what we noticed was there was about 15 species on top of our native seed mix that we had and so there was a lot going on with weedy species and then here we have some data looking at equivalent depth first that runoff parameter we can see that the treatments had both a treatment effect and a year effect and so in the next slide I'll split that up and talk about that a bit more but it's important to know that there was a year effect and then for that erosion parameter or that sediment load we had a treatment effect as well and then lastly that plant establishment variable none of our treatments were statistically different from each other and then same thing with our slope parameters so we ended up combining everything and eliminating the slope parameter from our statistical model when we do split up the equivalent depth over time we have on the x-axis bare ground mulch imprint with mulch straw and then imprint and looking at that equivalent depth that mulch is the first thing to jump out at you it was statistically the only one to be statistically different than that control and it multiplied runoff over six times from what we were seeing with our control and then another thing that jumps out is that imprinting imprinting worked extremely well initially it almost reduced runoff totally but it was not statistically different than that control and then in 2021 what we ended up seeing was that the mulch treatments were not different from each other and with this we can recommend not to do the combination of imprinting and hydromulch just because of the economic cost of implementing two treatments on one right away the last thing with this is that the straw was the only one to be statistically different than the control and when we experienced these long-term droughts like this straw is going to be our best recommendation as it was the only one to keep cover for the duration of this study that hydromulch broke down the imprint settled out and everything started to revert back to that control whereas straw was the only one to not do that looking at our erosion or that sediment load parameter both of those mulch treatments were the only ones to reduce erosion and be statistically different than that control they ended up reducing erosion by over 58 percent and they keep a lot of that sediment in the right away as we expected this led us to a few conclusions as we said before that imprinting is a great treatment initially if you can get that plant establishment to go within that first year that may be one of your better options you can see those imprints settle out over time as well that was one of their concerns with our stakeholders was would these imprints be permanent and we think that part of the reason that they settled out over time the way that they did is because we did not have the clay contents that some of our other soils in western or to go to had next our straw treatment is the most effective one over time this straw treatment was again the only one to reduce that set or that runoff parameter over time and it is also one of the most economical options straws obviously really readily available within the state and you can put it on most right of ways pretty easily and then lastly our imprinting with hydromulch was not different than our mulch and so we wouldn't recommend doing that combination simply because of the cost associated with that long term we think that using straw is the most economical option for our right of ways and it is great at reducing that runoff again in times of drought though any cover is going to be beneficial we've talked a lot today about reducing that evaporation and getting any kind of cover on that right away you need either a plant or straw of some sort to shade that right away and reduce the amount of sunlight coming down on that right away and that will in turn help your water conservation as this is the key to the whole process without water you won't have your plants germinating and your overall success will be diminished and the length of time and money is going to be significantly increased for this whole process some of the future research topics that we've been kicking around are using perpendicular methods for our straw crimping and so when we come across the right away the straw crimper goes with the slope as it's the only way to get that crimper on the right away easily but if you are able to do that perpendicularly or at a slope you may be able to even reduce runoff even more and catch some of that sediment too as that water wouldn't be going with the slope it would be running into that straw and hopefully going down into the surface also we've been talking about using different seeding methods seeding perpendicular to the right away maybe with a drill for this we use the broadcast seeder one other thing we've thought about is using annual cover crops and that's been mentioned a little bit today too just getting something out there to grow is beneficial and sometimes those weedy species aren't a bad thing covers incredibly important to this process too as you need that topsoil to stay within your right away lastly it may be beneficial to just postpone seeding to either the end of the season or even the next following season as long as you have cover on that right away you are probably going to see improvements within your right away in the long run with that thank you to a number of our sponsors H2 Enterprises specifically for helping us set up these plots and Williston REC for hosting us and with that I'd be happy to take any questions no so to make everything uniform across the plots we had to broadcast seed everything that would be another thing that we could test that imprimter has a drill seeder attached to it and you can also deep rip in front of those imprints um the hydromulcher too actually you can mix in seed with that hydromulcher tank and spread seed across your right away that way too but just for studies purposes we had to broadcast seed everything um when you were talking about cross crimping or there was two things you've talked about cross seeding um would you pick the area along the right away to do those or would you do that if the like the entire length how would you how would you do for a future study yeah yeah um you'd almost have to pick it so that every part of your right away would be even slope kind of thing and similar actual ecological sites if you were to do it as a study so and if you were going to do it implementing it say it works in your study and you're going to do it uh on the landscape basis how would you pick your sites that you would do that um that's a good question uh I think a lot of what's been going on too is that a lot of companies use more of a one-size-fits-all solution and so they have a 10-mile pipeline they just do the same thing for the whole 10 miles and that may be something that we look into later um you may come have to come up with uh like various recommendations for different ecological sites because if you do have a 10-mile pipeline you're going to be going through various different regions and you may want different recommendations for those types of differences so the question was what was the seedbed prep for our treatments or for the were for the plots before treatments were imposed uh initially the field had just finished its 12th year of no-till cropping and so there's a lot of barley residue uh we harrowed everything and reduced the cover that way and then tilled it up and so what you saw with the bare ground control was how everything was prior to plot installation yeah there was a great wind effect um williston had a couple days in the winter specifically that got over 100 miles an hour um and so we are on on a bit of a slope as we had talked about and towards the tops a lot of our treatments had disappeared in some areas and that probably led to a lot of the settling that we saw over time and then for our application rights for each strip so the hydromalch on this side we had to do the hydromalches next to each other and for each block there was a thousand gallons of water and 300 pounds of mulch and then for each straw treatment within each plot was one one round bale oh um each strip was 24 feet wide by 120 feet um yeah so i'm not sure what that would be in acreage but the entire study area was just under three acres