Undergraduate Research Conference Proceedings

Salicornia pacifica, or pickleweed, is a halophyte native to California wetlands. As a halophyte, it is adapted to saline conditions and the adverse impacts that come with living in these environments, including osmotic and oxidative stress. My goal is to determine how salinity affects the chlorophyll content of pickleweed in order to project the potential impacts of climate change on pickleweed growth. The approach I used was to grow pickleweed under greenhouse conditions in control, low, and high salinity irrigation treatments and to measure chlorophyll content after ten months. The control group was found to have 31% more chlorophyll per gram of fresh weight than the low group, and 39% more than the high group. The results suggest that pickleweed will have reduced chlorophyll content in the future due to increasing salinity of wetland soils as a result of climate change, implying lower productivity and ecosystem function of these wetlands.