Field studies
“Let us not suffice to the book-learned, to read what others have written and to take upon trust more falsehood than truth, but let us ourselves examine things as we have opportunity and converse with Nature as well as books” John Ray FRS, 1691.
Covering one third of Earth’s surface, though deserts derive their name from the word dēsertum, which means ‘abandoned place’, many are home to extraordinary species from across the Kingdoms of Life. Their biomes categorised into four main variants, those being hot and dry, semi-arid, coastal, and cold, the species that inhabit them have evolved many similar solutions to the challenge of living in some of the most inhospitable places on Earth, otherwise known as convergent evolution. Animals that have evolved to live in deserts are called xerocoles, whereas plants are known as xerophytes.
Having first studied xerophyte species in the late 00s as part of an investigation into how the functional traits of plants that have evolved to live with aridity could inform solutions to human problems, to then focus my attention on species that have evolved to live with wildfire, earlier this year I decided to revisit the question. In the first instance, I visited the Anza-Borrego Desert State Park during an extended stay in Southern California in January and February, to then spend nearly a month based just outside Borrego Springs across May and June. Located in the Colorado Desert, the park spans 585,930 acres, making it the largest state park in California, and the third largest in the United States. Occupying eastern San Diego County, the park is part of the Mojave and Colorado Deserts Biosphere Reserve, which was designated a biosphere reserve by UNESCO in 1984. Other parks in the reserve include the Santa Rosa Mountains Wildlife Management Area, which is adjacent to the Anza-Borrego, and the Death Valley National Park, which I visited during another extended stay in California and neighbouring states in the late 1990s.
Though some of the most iconic vistas in the park take in its badlands, which look so barren they could be located on some distant planet, thus have featured as filming locations in several feature films that were shot this past few decades, they are but one piece in its rich geological and ecological puzzle. However, their lithology speaks to the geological history of this most ancient of landscapes, which is littered with evidence of its significant transformations over deep time. For example, tread some of its most arid spots and you’ll find marine fossils from the now distant age when the area was covered by a sea. Look to the exposed surfaces of the mountains that surround Borrego Springs and you’ll see bands of rock that serve as a gigantic three dimensional infographic that shows the geological ages piled one atop the other.
Fortunate to have been staying on a private air ranch in the middle of the Anza-Borrego International Dark Sky Park, I was able to take in the desert ecology both night and day. One reason that’s so important to studying desert plants and animals is the fact that many are more active once the Sun has set. Xerocoles and xerophytes have evolved many traits, both physiological and behavioural, that enable them to not just survive, but the thrive in the extreme aridity and heat of deserts like the Colorado. Ecologically, the habitats of the Colorado Desert ecosystem are a subclass of the Sonoran Desert ecoregion. The Anza-Borrego Desert State Park itself has around 600 species of native plants which are spread across a number of different regional ecosystem types including creosote bush-bur sage with creosote bush, and palo-verde-cactus shrub, together with Colorado/Sonoran microphylla woodlands. Plants that populate these systems including among others Ocotillo, Cacti, Palo Verde, Velvet Mesquite, and smoke trees, as well as the state’s only native palm, the California fan palm.
Principally concerned with botanical biomimicry and ecomimicry, my field studies focus was centred on the local plant life. However, as in any ecosystem, the relationship between flora and fauna is symbiotic, hence my studies took in xerocoles too. From a distance, deserts like the Colorado can look still and relatively lifeless, but look closer and you find a rich assembly of species that are all perfectly evolved to exist in their surroundings. Desert animals that I saw with abundance included Ground squirrels, Kangaroo rats, Cottontail rabbits, Costa’s hummingbirds, Verdin, Black-throated sparrows, Prairie falcons, Roadrunners, Great Horned owls, White-winged doves, and Turkey vultures. Observing the activities of these and other species through the day and night revealed how they persist in conditions that some would imagine to be uninhabitable. Thankfully, though the desert is full of animals of the kind that can cause mortality, I spotted just a few such creatures close to hand, and instead observed specimens up close from behind glass during visits to San Diego Zoo and San Diego Zoo Safari Park. Nonetheless, I headed advice that had been given on how to avoid being stung, bitten, or otherwise attacked by a local ‘critter’.
Like the 17th century English naturalist John Ray, and with him notable natural philosophers and scientists including Alexander von Humboldt and Charles Darwin, among many others, I firmly believe that you cannot understand nature and its workings unless you get out in it. Books, journals, and other publications can tell you so much, but they can never tell you the whole story. Field trips are imperative to gaining the insights that provide a systemic understanding of the processes of biological systems, and the wider systems of which they are just a part. Observations of the natural world should not be rushed, because the many and varied species of the world conduct their affairs at their pace, not ours. For my part, I have been observing nature since early childhood, starting with many hours spent in a den I built from which I would quietly observe the local wildfire, together with further daily observations from my bedroom window, which had looked out onto a small patch of trees that were home to a number of native English species. Today, as then, when observing nature I make notes and sketches, the only difference is that whereas of old these were always analogue - hand drawn and scripted, today they are a mix of analogue and digital, including photographs, films, sound clips, and more. The herbariums I created are not restricted to the pages of paperbound books, but span all manner of media, which I then interrogate using a wide array of tools, again, both analog and digital.
Where my field studies vary from those of Ray, Humboldt, and Darwin is in the matter that though, like them, I regularly note observations of natural phenomena that may or may not be previously observed, I also jot down design ideas my that my field studies have ignited. In that sense, my research process is more like that of Leonardo da Vinci, in that I simultaneously undertake both scientific studies and design studies. And, like da Vinci, the ideas I research and develop evolve over time, with the roots of some stretching literally decades back. In a day and age in which independent scientists have become a rarity, it’s hard to gage how many others work in this way too. More generally, scientific field trips involve large teams working under tight time constraints and to very specific agendas, thus not necessarily able to take a transdisciplinary approach. Furthermore, working in this way is not for everyone. Some prefer to work on studies that are siloed, and in some instances that befits their research aims.
While researching and developing solutions inspired by pyrophytes (plants that have evolved to live with wildfire) will remain my focus, I am now expanding my R&D activities to re-integrate not only studies into how this class of extremophiles can inform and inspire design, but with them plants that have evolved to live with aridity, with flooding, and with other classes of natural hazard including storms. My original studies across these fields having been largely published between 2009 and 2016 as part of the Bionic City® project, I’ll be building on those early works. But, these new works will be researched and developed under another project which I am calling Extremophytic Architecture™, and which will comprise subclasses including both Pyrophytic Architecture™, of which my PhD thesis and its legacy works are a part, and Xerophytic Architecture™, which is the strand within which the concepts stemming from these recent desert field trips will sit. In the months ahead I’ll be sharing a series of open access essays that document some of the recent research and its outputs, as well as giving some interviews in podcasts and other formats.
Image: Barrel cactus, taken by Melissa Sterry during a field trip in the Anza-Borrego Desert State Park in May 2024.