The herbicide atrazine is both widely used in the United States and persistent in the environment, making atrazine contamination of groundwater a real environmental and human health problem. Atrazine can act as an endocrine disrupting compound, so understanding how atrazine enters the groundwater and developing ways to reduce the amount of contamination are important efforts. One of the projects in the soil and water lab is investigating the possibility of using the soil amendment called biochar to reduce atrazine leaching into groundwater.

​

Biochar is an agricultural soil amendment that resembles charcoal and is gaining popularity both as a means of improving soil quality and as a means of carbon sequestration (biochar is very stable in soil environments and could be used as a means of storing atmospheric in the soil for hundreds of years). Biochar is produced by pyrolyzing biomass, which gives the char high surface area to volume ratios. This high surface area can adsorb many different chemicals in the soil. Past studies have shown that atrazine will adsorb to biochar, so the research question at hand is to determine if applying biochar in agricultural settings with decrease the amount of atrazine leached through the soil profile.

​

In order to test this we are conducting lab scale experiments using soil columns and field scale experiments in a local Cornell field. The lab scale soil columns include both homogenized soil profiles and undisturbed soil cores extracted from the field. This will allow us to determine how important natural macropore/micropore structure is to atrazine transport. The field project includes 100 groundwater wells distributed throughout experimental treatment plots located in a switchgrass field. We analyze all water samples using the ELISA method.