The Desert Laboratory on Tumamoc Hill, Tucson, Arizona, is a 350-hectare reserve with a 99-yr legacy in ecological research in deserts. The Desert Lab was the brainchild of Frederick V. Coville, chief botanist of the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture. Inspired by his explorations of Death Valley in 1891, Coville convinced the Carnegie Institution of Washington to establish a laboratory to study adaptations of plants to aridity. In 1903, Coville and Daniel T. MacDougal of the New York Botanical Garden toured the Southwest and Mexico in search of a site. They settled on Tumamoc Hill, a saguaro-studded butte overlooking what was then a small university town of ten thousand people.
From 1903 to 1940, the Desert Laboratory pioneered ecological research in deserts and played a key role in the emergence of ecology as a discipline. Scientists working at the Desert Laboratory during this period included William Cannon, Forrest and Edith Shreve, and Volney and Effie Spalding. Desert Lab scientists were among the founders of the Ecological Society of America in 1915, and Plant World, a botanical journal published at the Desert Lab, was turned over to ESA in 1920 to become the journal Ecology. In 1940, the Carnegie Institution transferred the Desert Lab to the Forest Service, and the facility became the Southwest Forest and Range Experiment Station.
In 1956, the University of Arizona bought the Desert Lab to house the new Department of Geochronology under Terah (Ted) Smiley's direction. A young palynologist from Michigan, Paul Martin, was hired to broaden the scope of research to include the history of desert environments; he has since become well known for his work on Pleistocene extinction. During the 1950s, Ray Turner, then a professor in the Department of Botany at the University of Arizona, monitored long-established permanent vegetation plots on the Desert Laboratory grounds. After he left the university to work for the U.S. Geological Survey, he continued to track vegetation changes on the plots. In 1976 he became a full-time presence at the Desert Laboratory, moving from sterile quarters downtown to the fertile slopes of Tumamoc Hill. Both Paul and Ray retired in 1989. Their legacies include a rich paleobotanical archive now being exploited for geochemical, anatomical and genetic studies; a series of long-term vegetation plots in the Sonoran Desert; a digitized data base of plant distributions in the Sonoran Desert; and an archive of repeat photography comprising some 3000 historical views of western landscapes and one or more recent matches of each.
Jay Quade inherited Paul's position as director and injected the Desert Lab with a strong dose of geology and stable isotope geochemistry. The USGS hired Bob Webb and Julio Betancourt, former graduate students in the Department of Geosciences, as replacements for Ray. They were joined recently by Waite Osterkamp, a USGS geomorphologist. Janice Bowers was hired in 1982 and has studied the autecology of perennial plants on Tumamoc Hill ever since. Betsy Pierson, who worked at the Desert Lab in the early 1990s, deserves special recognition for her heroic efforts in resampling the saguaro population and analyzing its dynamics. In 1993, we were joined by Jack Wolfe, a retired USGS paleobotanist, who continues his research as an adjunct professor in the Department of Geosciences. Larry Venable, a professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology (EEB), has conducted experimental studies on the population biology of desert annuals at Tumamoc Hill since 1982. In 2001, EEB hired two more plant ecologists, Brian Enquist and Travis Huxman. They and their students have eagerly initiated their own studies at Tumamoc Hill, becoming a welcome addition to the long tradition of ecological research at the Desert Laboratory.
If you are interested in further information about the Desert Laboratory's history and research activities, you can view a listing of selected publications of current Desert Laboratory scientists, or a listing of selected publications involving ecological research at the Desert Laboratory. You can also download a synopsis of ongoing field research on Tumamoc Hill. You will need Adobe Acrobat Reader to view this document.