Landscape Architecture & Horticulture

Back to Blog July 25, 2024

Temple faculty hope to save PennDOT’s plants from deadly road salt

Author: Jordan Cameron
Joni Baumgarten, Sasha Eisenman, Laura Toran, Josh Caplan and Abdullah Al-Amin

An interdisciplinary team of researchers from Temple and Villanova was commissioned by PennDOT in 2017 to research and monitor bioretention basins—small green spaces filled with a variety of flowering plants, grasses and trees—along I-95 to help improve their design. These basins become filled with deicing salt used to treat roads in the winter, which is detrimental to the health of the plant life. 

The Temple group includes Josh Caplan, an associate professor of horticulture at Tyler, and Sasha Eisenman, chair of Tyler’s Architecture and Environmental Design Department. 

Read the full story by Jonny Hart on the Temple Now website. 

Image: Photo by Joseph V. Labolito