naturalist

Naturalist description

As a naturalist I am perennially in awe of the diverse forms of life I encounter. As an ecologist I use this awe of encountered life as a springboard to considering the ways nature's complexity organizes into a self-balancing system. It is in this pursuit of understanding nature, testing our proposed understandings, and spreading the joy of its encounters that I increasingly focus my efforts. 

I developed interest in and appreciation of nature and ecological systems via my anthropological interests in human evolution, behavior, and human relationships with the natural world. Humans have always depended on nature's biodiversity for their survival, and despite the industrial obfuscation of this truth from modern people’s daily experiences in complex market societies, human wellbeing will continue to depend on the wellbeing of nature. As David Attenborough reports in A Life on Our Planet (and as shown in the plot below), “A sixth mass extinction is well underway”. Though the quadratic trend line below explains 99% of the wilderness variation reported for 1937, 1954, 1960, 1978, 1997, and 2020, it need not be a model that accurately predicts loss of most life on Earth for the next generation. There is hope yet if we can rewild by inviting nature back into our suburban and urban spaces, by practicing natural farming, and by allowing nature to thrive without human interference in wild places.

In 2021, after completing the Desert Sands and Sky Islands California Naturalist course I was certified as a California Naturalist by the University of California Riverside. Since 2021 I have been making regular photographed contributions of organismal observations via iNaturalist (linked below), while participating in iNaturalist projects (e.g. 2021 California Desert Naturalist), and collaborating with the University of California Riverside Palm Desert Center’s Center for Conservation Biology Research Team. I manage two southern California based iNaturalists projects where I am cataloguing the diversity of life encountered: Nature at Home in Mentone and Fremont Peak Bowl Refugium. These efforts — observing, recording, and cataloguing life — eventually led me to ask what we might be missing, and to pursue an answer with new tools: see the eDNA Study of the Fremont Peak Bowl Refugium described below.

* Within a week of posting this page and the figure above, my nephew coincidentally gifted me a collaged wooden horse he had made: legs, neck, and head wrapped in world maps and nature scenes, a hamburger featured on one side, and the other side bearing the words, "The world in 2070"!

iNaturalist

eDNA Study of the Fremont Peak Bowl Refugium, Mojave Desert

What Lives Here That Hasn't Been Seen Yet? 

An Environmental DNA Study of the Fremont Peak Bowl Refugium, Western Mojave Desert

There is a bowl-shaped depression in the Western Mojave Desert, sheltered by the slopes of Fremont Peak, where life has quietly accumulated in surprising abundance. Over years of photography, camera trapping, acoustic recording, and community-contributed iNaturalist observations, I have documented more than 150 species within this small conservation area — insects, reptiles, birds, mammals, plants, and more. For a patch of Mojave Desert, that's a rich inventory. 

But I've barely scratched the surface. 

Traditional survey methods — the ones that depend on something being seen, heard, or photographed — miss entire categories of life by design. Subterranean organisms never come to the surface. Microscopic fungi thread invisibly through the soil. Dormant seeds and spores wait out years of drought. Nocturnal and cryptic species move through the landscape without ever crossing a camera frame. Ecologists have a term for all of this invisible abundance: hidden biodiversity, or sometimes dark diversity — the species that are almost certainly present but leave no trace in conventional records.

In 2026, this study goes underground to look for hidden biodiversity. 

The Tool: Environmental DNA

Environmental DNA — eDNA — is genetic material that organisms shed into their surroundings simply by existing: cells sloughed from roots, fungal spores, the microscopic residue of movement through soil. A handful of desert soil contains a biological archive of everything that has lived, passed through, or decomposed in that spot. Using metabarcoding — a technique that sequences DNA from the entire community present in a sample at once — it's now possible to identify hundreds or thousands of organisms from a single scoop of earth, across the full breadth of life from bacteria and fungi to plants, invertebrates, and vertebrates.

A landmark study in the Atacama Desert demonstrated this powerfully: eDNA from soil revealed hidden plant diversity that visual surveys had entirely missed, even in one of the most thoroughly studied arid landscapes on earth. I expect to find something similar in the Mojave — and then some, because this study looks across all domains of life, not just plants. 

Focused Research Question: Does Green Mean More Life?

In addition to the question of what hidden diversity might be discovered at the refugium, the study carries a second, more pointed question embedded within it — and this is where the science gets interesting. 

It seems intuitive that greener, more vegetated spots in a desert would harbor more biodiversity. More plants means more food, more shade, more habitat complexity — so more everything, right? The evidence, it turns out, is more complicated than that.

A recent study tested exactly this idea in semi-arid Australia, selecting plots carefully stratified by vegetative greenness and measuring eDNA-detected species richness across them. The result: no significant relationship between greenness and biodiversity. But there's a critical catch — that study looked only at vertebrates. And vertebrates, as a group, have a particular and somewhat counterintuitive relationship with greenness in hot, arid environments.

Consider the lizard. Desert lizards are ectotherms — they regulate their body temperature behaviorally, moving between sun and shade across the day. What they need is not lush green vegetation but thermal heterogeneity: sun-warmed rock surfaces to bask on, rocky outcrops and crevices to retreat to when temperatures climb too high. The best lizard habitat in the Mojave may be a rocky, sparsely vegetated slope that a greenness index would score quite low. A greener, more vegetated spot might actually be thermally less useful — or even less accessible — for the reptiles that dominate desert vertebrate communities. In short, the species whose diversity was measured in that study may be precisely the ones least likely to track greenness.

The full biosphere is another matter entirely. Fungi, soil microbiota, plant roots, invertebrates, protists — these organisms have very different relationships with moisture, plant cover, and soil organic matter than lizards do. Whether greenness predicts biodiversity richness across the complete breadth of detectable life is, genuinely, an open and underexplored question. The Fremont Peak Bowl Refugium, with its distinct microhabitats and documented variation in plant communities across a small area, is an ideal place to probe it.

The Design

In March, June, September, and December of 2026, I will visit four sites within the refugium — each selected to represent a distinct microhabitat type, with differing degrees of vegetative cover and plant community composition. At each site, I collect soil from 10 randomly selected points, which are sent to a laboratory for eDNA metabarcoding through the California All-Taxa Biodiversity Inventory (CalATBI) pipeline, returning a species list that spans every detectable kingdom of life. 

At every sampling point I also photograph the ground surface with a calibrated color card in frame — not for aesthetics, but to extract a quantitative greenness score from each image using green-channel pixel analysis in Photoshop, normalized against a color calibration card's gray reference patches. This yields a precise, comparable greenness measurement for each site and season that can be tested directly against eDNA-detected richness. 

Soil sampling is complemented by insect sweep net collections — 20 minutes of active sweeping per site, processed through automated morphotype-sorting technology (DiversityScanner) — to capture a parallel window into invertebrate diversity that soil eDNA alone might miss. 

The study is preregistered at OSF, where the hypotheses, sampling plan, and analysis approach are publicly timestamped before any data are collected or analyzed. This is standard practice in open science, and it's particularly important here to be transparent about what was predicted versus what was discovered. 

Expected Findings

The first hypothesis is almost a proof of concept: eDNA metabarcoding should detect organisms already documented at the refugium through traditional methods — and if it doesn't, something has gone wrong with the technique. More exciting is the second part: it should also detect organisms never before recorded there. Hidden fungi, cryptic invertebrates, dormant plant species, soil protists with no iNaturalist entry to their name. The question isn't really whether hidden biodiversity exists at the refugium — it almost certainly does — but how much, and what. 

The second hypothesis is the one that carries genuine scientific uncertainty: that sites with higher vegetative greenness will harbor greater eDNA-detected species richness across all taxonomic groups. The answer is likely yes — but the lizard problem reminds us that the relationship between green and biodiversity is not as simple as it looks from above. 

The Fremont Peak Bowl Refugium has long kept its secrets buried. In 2026, the soil finally gives them up. 

This study is conducted in coordination with the California All-Taxa Biodiversity Inventory (CalATBI). The preregistration is publicly available at OSF:

Preregistration https://osf.io/8zqu9