PHOENIX — Around 6:30 a.m. one February morning in 2024, researchers watching a group chat saw a saguaro collapse. For six months, lidar scanners — the same technology that lets self-driving cars map their surroundings — had been recording the giant cactus day by day. The scans documented the saguaro as it pulsed with life, leaned and finally toppled.
The scans were part of Framerate: Desert Pulse, an art-and-data project commissioned by the Desert Botanical Garden in Phoenix and created with London-based ScanLAB Projects. The installation pairs detailed 3D scans of Tucson-area desert plots — saguaros, prickly pear, ocotillo, cholla and more — with immersive video projections and a booming soundtrack by Pascal Wyse that uses found desert materials, including saguaro spines. Giant outdoor screens loop the imagery among living plants, and a separate room surrounds visitors with screens on walls, floor and ceiling.
ScanLAB technicians fired millions of laser pulses into garden beds every day for a year. Those lasers reflected off every surface to build perfect 3D models, producing billions of data points the team calls “digital dust.” Repeated scans captured minute, day-to-day changes: cacti swelling as they absorbed water, arms reaching skyward, sand shifted by humans and animals, pebbles moving, branches waggling, cholla pads clinging, weeds sprouting and then dying. The project also recorded human impacts on the landscape — a housing development creeping to the desert’s edge, a dairy farm, a Target parking lot and a landfill — images the artists say invite reflection on sustainability.
The work is at once celebration and warning, said Matthew Shaw, ScanLAB co-founder. “You see that it’s deteriorating, but it’s still giving life to everything around it,” Laura Spalding Best, the garden’s senior director of exhibits, said of the saguaro footage. Team members described the day the cactus fell as both exciting and sorrowful.
Beyond its artistic aims, the dataset offers scientists a rare, dense record of growth and change that would be hard to gather by visiting a site daily. Kim McCue, the garden’s vice president and chief research officer, said the scans already revealed behaviors researchers hadn’t expected: agaves repeatedly folding and unfolding their rosettes over days, for example. That raises questions about adaptive purposes — might the leaf movements protect against heat? — that the garden’s scientists can now investigate.
The lidar captures not only shape but subtler signals, too. Shaw noted that laser reflections can indicate moisture under a cactus’s skin, a feature that might help explain why some saguaros collapse. After the saguaro fell, the scanners continued to monitor the carcass for six months as it nourished wildlife and gradually returned to the desert floor, creating a detailed decomposition timeline that could inform efforts to protect other giants.
Parsing the enormous trove of data will take years, but the possibilities are wide. Garden researchers can quantify growth rates, phenology (timing of blooms), microtopography changes and how animals use particular structures. That information could guide conservation decisions, such as which areas need protection or how plants respond to extreme heat and drought.
There is precedent for turning ScanLAB’s art-driven data into scientific insight: work by the studio helped produce a peer-reviewed paper on coastal erosion in England, providing information useful for protecting infrastructure. Framerate: Desert Pulse similarly bridges art and science, giving the public an emotional entry point while producing a rigorous record for researchers.
The project’s creators and the garden hope the public-facing installation will spark curiosity about the desert’s complex life and about human impacts on it, even as scientists and technicians begin the long task of turning “digital dust” into conservation knowledge.