February

Does a tough modern rose really need 4 inches of water a month to survive a drought? Can a plant bounce back after an entire growing season without rain? A group of Central Texas entities is hoping to find these and other answers by analyzing popular local landscape plants in a drought-survivability study.

Constructing a water well begins with making several design decisions, including whether to drill the well horizontally or vertically. Ben Blumenthal, former Texas Water Resources Institute research assistant, investigated the use of horizontal drilling technology for groundwater production and developed mathematical models that simplify that decision-making process.

An invited commentary by the chairman of the Texas Water Development Board on the Texas-Mexico water treaty and an article on the Rincon Bayou Pipeline on the Lower Nueces Delta are the first two articles in the 2015 issue of the Texas Water Journal.

A quick look around Texas A&M University is all you need to see that the campus and the surrounding community are becoming more urbanized. But, this is not necessarily at odds with Texas A&M’s history as an agricultural college. A growing on-campus farming venture is linking Texas A&M’s agricultural heritage to today’s Aggieland, while adopting a forward-thinking perspective on sustainability, said Howdy Farm president Jessica Newman.