The pelletized amendments were sort of disappointing, actually. We did get some results. The Dugway Proving Ground site showed some significant effects. The second and fourth year, chlorophyll a was significantly higher in the inoculated plots. The inoculated plots also had significantly less runoff. This was our most interesting and promising effect. However, none of the other sites showed differences due to inoculation. Now there are a couple of reasons that this may be so. First off, the southwest was gripped in one of the worst droughts they've had this century. It's ill-advised to try to do reclamation research by throwing little pellets of algae onto the surface of the soil and hoping they grow, when your inoculation treatment is followed by 700 rain-free days with temperatures frequently in excess of 100° F. So, it may have just been the wrong time for some of these sites.

I also think that there may have been some problems with the pellets. Maybe the cyanobacteria were not very viable, or could not escape from the pellets when they were in the field. Maybe they blew away before it rained. All of these possibilities may be important in explaining why the pellets might not have worked in the field even though they worked in the greenhouse study. But we're doing some more studies, and actually we have some other types of inocula that we feel may get around some of these problems.

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