Rachel loves music and plays the flute in a band and an orchestra and as an accompaniment to a choir. She also likes to swim and camp. Rachel hopes to become a teacher because she believes that teaching elementary school would be a challenging career.
She cites Cliff Crawford, a professor at the Bosque Ecosystem Monitoring Program, as her mentor and notes that he encourages her to "ask questions and discover answers."
Salt cedar trees are a non-native, invasive species that drinks up to 300 gallons of water a day in the riverside forest known as "the bosque" in New Mexico. The trees' massive taproots also tend to interfere with the water table. A professor at the Bosque Ecosystem Monitoring Program challenged Leah and Rachel to see if salt cedar trees grow better in the open or under the cottonwood canopy of the forest. A recent forest fire provided an opportunity to observe whether, after a summer of growth, there would be more salt cedars in the burned areas than in the unburned areas.
The girls counted the number of salt cedars on either side of a firebreak. They divided areas on both the burned and unburned sides into plots of 10 square meters and recorded the trees' height and health and the ratio the salt cedars to cottonwoods. They found that there were more salt cedars in the burned areas than in the unburned areas. Further studies are needed to see if this is because the cottonwood canopy inhibits the salt cedars' growth or because salt cedars thrive in areas cleared by fire.
