Shortly after dawn one February morning, a towering saguaro collapsed and a group chat lit up. For six months lidar scanners had been tracking the cactus day by day, recording how it swelled with water, leaned and ultimately fell. The moment was both exhilarating and mournful for the researchers, technicians and artists involved in a multi-year art-and-data project led by the Desert Botanical Garden in Phoenix and London-based ScanLAB Projects.
That project, Framerate: Desert Pulse, stitches together detailed 3D scans of the Sonoran Desert — saguaros and prickly pear, ocotillo and cholla — into large outdoor projections and an immersive indoor chamber with screens on walls, floor and ceiling. A soundtrack by Pascal Wyse, created largely from desert materials such as cactus spines, accompanies the imagery. The installation celebrates the desert while calling attention to human impacts on the landscape, from new housing developments to parking lots and landfills.
The project also functions as a rich scientific record. Technicians used lidar to fire millions of laser pulses at the landscape; the pulses reflect off every surface and create highly accurate 3D models. Repeating the scans nearly every day for a year produced a time series that captured subtle, everyday changes: saguaros expanding after rain, cactus pads and branches shifting in wind, sand and pebbles being moved by animals or people, weeds sprouting and withering, and blooms opening and closing.
The resulting point clouds — what the team calls digital dust — amount to billions of data points. Because the dataset is dense and continuous, researchers at the garden now have unprecedented records of daily growth and change that would be impractical to collect by visiting a site only occasionally. Kim McCue, the garden’s vice president and chief research officer, says the scans have already revealed unexpected behavior, such as agaves folding and unfolding their rosette leaves over days. Those movements may serve an adaptive function, perhaps helping plants manage heat.
Beyond plant physiology, the scans document how people reshape the desert. The imagery captured the edge of a housing development, a dairy with cattle and crowds at a baseball stadium, prompting reflection on sustainability and land use.
The fallen saguaro became a case study in decomposition and ecosystem service. The team continued scanning the dead column for six months, observing how it nourished wildlife and slowly reintegrated into the landscape. ScanLAB notes that lidar reflections can sometimes indicate moisture levels beneath a plant’s skin, suggesting a way to track water content as a cactus declines — information that could help explain why some giants fail.
Together, the art installation and the long-term lidar dataset create a new window into desert dynamics. The visuals engage the public while the data create a resource for conservation science, from studying plant physiology to monitoring human-driven change. As project leaders say, the record is only as useful as the imagination of the scientists and conservationists who explore it.