BROTHERS, Ore. - The anecdotal wisdom in eastern Oregon is that juniper trees suck the water out of country that's parched to start with.
Junipers are native to the territory, but not in large numbers.
They have spread rapidly along with livestock grazing and fire suppression .
Rancher Lynee Breese of Prineville remembers that her husband's grandmother kept a garden fed by groundwater.
"But as the juniper came in, it utilized the water," Breese said. "The well went dry."
The two 300-acre plots are an outdoor laboratory to document that sort of observation.
One is filled with junipers, some as high as 50 feet, and growing so thick that their flaky branches touch. On the other side of a ridge, next to nothing is standing. Acres of trees are cut, lying on the ground with their drying needles turning brown.
The researchers first spent more than a decade measuring and observing the movement of water in the two unaltered watersheds, which are on private and Bureau of Land Management land.
Last fall, they cut down a majority of the junipers growing in one of the watersheds. In the years to come, they'll compare the two areas to investigate how juniper removal transforms landscapes.
While researchers have heard many stories similar to Breese's, this OSU watershed project is the first large-scale experiment to tackle the question scientifically, said project leader John Buckhouse, a professor of rangeland ecology and management at OSU.
"All the work up to this point has been on a fairly small-plot kind of a basis. This is on a watershed scale," Buckhouse said this week during a tour of the watersheds.
Buckhouse and other researchers predict that getting rid of the junipers could promote the growth of grasses and shrubs. This could reduce soil erosion and result in more water seeping through the soil and sticking around later into the year. More water in the ground could mean more food and habitat for wildlife, more forage for livestock and more stream flow.
The project "has everyone in the West's eyes on it, because how this turns out is going to probably have some very serious implications for how land is managed across the Intermountain West," Buckhouse said.