JENNIE GARLINGTON: On this episode of Ecosense... DON GUERRA: Every loaf of bread has a story.

I can trace it back to the farmer who grew it, the person who brought it to me, and the people who eat it.

And it's really a community celebration.

♪ ♪ TANNER BLAND: They're fluffy.

Fluffy and cute and -- It's so hot, right?

You don't wanna have hair all over your body.

♪ ♪ LAUREL FROELICH: Being out there and seeing there's so much more than what is just directly in front of us is incredibly impactful and it's changed my life.

♪ ♪ JENNIE: In the heart of the Sonoran Desert, where summer temperatures soar past 110 degrees and rainfall is scarce, a small organization is preserving something precious, seeds that have fed people here for thousands of years.

♪ ♪ RAQUEL AVILES: It's a simple mission to save and preserve and to share our seeds from indigenous communities and tribal lands.

JOEL JOHNSON: We don't wanna be a museum or a genetic repository or any of that, we wanna be a safe resting spot for seed that is ultimately safest when it's in the hands of farmers and growers in the communities who have worked with these seeds for generations.

♪ ♪ HELENA GONZALEZ: This is the inside of the seed bank.

Everything's temperature controlled, humidity controlled, to optimize the longevity of the seeds.

We have over 1,800 different accessions of seeds, and over a hundred different species in the collection.

JOEL: All the seeds in the Native Seed Search collection have been grown in this region in desert soils for anywhere from a hundred to, in some cases, three and four thousand years.

And so, when these go into the ground, the communities and agricultural stewards who have shaped those seeds, they've already done all the work to ensure what is in that seed line is used to these conditions.

♪ ♪ RAQUEL: There's been several reasons why either the seeds weren't passed on to family members and weren't able to grow them.

There was loss of diversity just because of the climate.

JOEL: Over the last 150 years, we've lost about 75% of all agricultural diversity around the world.

So, if there's less varieties that means, if there's a disease, and we're all using the same variety, it's gonna wipe it all out at the same time.

But if we're growing corn and we're all at different elevations, different soils, and we all have different corns, then something may damage your crop and it won't affect mine at all.

RAQUEL: I came to know Native Seeds through my father, he was a gardener.

He would take us to go pick our seeds, our free seeds.

So, we always thought it was a cool experience that we were able to just pick seeds and they didn't charge us.

So, that's how I learned about Native Seed Search.

JOEL: Our goal is to harvest from 80 really quality plants, but we also wanna grow them out and see if anything's weak or diseased or susceptible to pests, and we wanna remove those.

One of the things that's really unique about growing in the Sonoran Desert is a lot of people think about gardening, and the first thing they picture is a raised bed.

And, that works really well in somewhere like the Pacific Northwest where you have a cool, wet spring, and so your goal is raise that soil up so it can drain excess moisture and it can start to heat up and dry out.

All of that is exactly the opposite of what we wanna do here in the desert.

The soil is always too hot, it's always too dry.

So, all of this is based off of Ak-chen, O'odham, Yaqui, Zuni, Southwestern tribes who have been practicing this type of agriculture for thousands of years.

RAQUEL: We're having longer summers, hotter days.

The rainfall didn't happen in the normal cycle, so the water is scarce here.

The rivers are very dry.

I've noticed the water doesn't flow as long as it used to because it seeps right into the dirt.

JUSTIN RISLEY: We need to do our best to keep these varieties adapted to this changing climate.

Our monsoon season and seasons in general are getting harder to predict, we're seeing less rainfall, we're seeing longer periods of drought and extreme heat.

It's important that we continue to regenerate the seeds for those reasons as well, so they can consistently adapt to these changing conditions, so they can remain strong.

And I truly believe that they have the adaptations and the genetic biodiversity to do just that.

So, the seeds definitely give us hope in the face of climate change.

JOEL: Crops that can produce on less water, less inputs, less care, but still perform, and that's what everything that's in the seed collection here really checks that box.

When conditions are the hottest and the hardest, that's when we see these varieties perform way better than others.

Even in really low or no monsoon seasons, we're getting a strong harvest because that's what they've been bred for for generations.

This entire field is a rainwater harvesting basin.

So that when it rains, water coming in from the west, water coming in from this high plateau over here all drains into the area where we have the crops planted.

But whenever possible, when there are rains present, we can shut off all the irrigation and we can just let these crops grow the way they always have, which is using rainwater as their source of irrigation.

If we grow a lot of seed but it's so dependent on irrigation, then it goes back to a community or farmer who's planting it on only rainwater.

If it can't perform in those conditions, there's no point in us maintaining that seed because that's what it's bred for.

So, we wanna make sure we're using methods like this where we're kind of balancing the need to be able to produce reliably, but also to produce really resilient crops because that's the need.

♪ ♪ JUSTIN: In the 50s, with the green revolution and hybrid varieties becoming more preferred, things like heritage varieties kind of got put to the side for a bit, even though that they performed really well here and use way less water.

Don Guerra noticed this and wanted to use these heritage grains to make this bread, ended up being a pretty good bread.

♪ ♪ DON GUERRA: In 2009, I started Barrio Bread from my garage and Native Seeds Search became one of the wholesale clients.

One day, when I was delivering bread, they had mentioned there was a grant that was going to be written that would provide some funding to grow Chapalote corn and the Sonoran white wheat.

I'd always dreamt of making bread with fresh grains and grains from my backyard, even more spectacular sounding.

So, it was really an amazing opportunity and just a coincidence that we just came together that way.

And really it was that first loaf I made, it wasn't pretty, but when it came out of the oven it felt different.

My whole bakery smelled different.

This certain aroma from the Sonoran wheat, which is like a sweet, wheaty aroma.

And I realized that this had huge impact for my community, had huge impact for my career, and how it's so special because this was a revitalization, a re-renaissance of heirloom grains.

RAQUEL: I believe they're healthier because they're not genetically modified.

They're heritage seeds.

Here, we grow organically.

So, I think what you plant, and what you put in your body is a big difference than if you buy seeds that are just produced like commodities.

I believe it's better for you and your health if you grow your own food, know what's in the soil, grow the food, cook the food, and then, you know, eat the food.

So, it's a whole wellness cycle.

Indigenous people or tribal people are able to get fifteen free packets a year.

And so, we have a seed listing that's specifically for them so they can choose seeds that are important to their community.

So, we encourage them to talk to their elders and their community farmers so they can learn more about the seeds that are important to them.

And I feel it's more of a partnership and we're here to provide stewardship until the seeds are ready to go back to the community.

I've seen it where community comes together to start a garden with youth and elders and they're actually working together and planting, and they grow the food and the plant or the medicine and then they harvest it and then they share it.

They share it with the community and then they share what they cook, and they share what they make with the food, and it just brings everyone together.

And I really believe wellness is a body, mind, and soul model and what you eat and who you connect with and what you do with that really affects everyone around you.

♪ ♪ DON: I've taught over 8,000 people in this community alone how to bake my style of bread.

That's really important because I'm not the teacher all the time.

They learn, they reteach, and the cycle continues.

What I like to set out to do is create a movement around this grain, to be able to tell the story of this place and the people through every loaf of bread.

Every loaf of bread has a story.

I can trace it back to the farmer who grew it, the person who brought it to me, and the people who eat it.

And it's really a community celebration.

Passing that daily loaf over to our guests makes me feel so proud.

It makes them smile, and it really strengthens the community ties that we have here in Tucson and beyond.

♪ ♪ JENNIE: If you imagine a bee, you probably think of a honeybee, but there are thousands of other species.

And the Sonoran Desert in Arizona may have the most in the world.

♪ ♪ KIM FRANKLIN: Most people hear the word "desert," and they think of a pretty barren landscape without a whole lot of vegetation, maybe sand dunes.

But the Sonoran Desert is very different.

It's one of the most lush deserts in the world, and just a huge diversity of ecosystems within the desert.

♪ ♪ There are really dry regions of the Sonoran Desert that are more typical of what people think of deserts, very little vegetation, but there are also these mountain ranges within the desert that go up 10,000 or more feet, and you have conifer forests at the top.

♪ ♪ It's really unusual that we have a greater diversity of bees here than in the tropics, and only some deserts in the Mediterranean region rival the diversity of the Sonoran Desert.

And part of the reason for that diversity is because we have these two rainy seasons.

So, we have a summer bloom of wildflowers, but we also have the spring bloom of wildflowers after the winter rainfall.

So, just this incredible diversity of plants leads to this incredible diversity of bees.

These are nothing like honeybees.

Honeybees are social, and these bees are solitary.

So, each bee is like a single mother.

It makes its own nest all on its own.

It provisions that nest with food, pollen, that's what baby bees eat, and then the baby bee is left to its own.

And it actually spends most of its life underground and it only emerges at the time of year when, hopefully, the plants that it depends on for food are also blooming.

There's so, so much that we don't know about bees.

We don't even know all the species that are here.

I mean, scientists estimate -- they have described about 20,000 species, but there's more than that on the planet, and then what do each of those species do?

Which plants do they visit?

Just that basic information is missing for many, many species.

Here at the Desert Museum, in collaboration with the University of Arizona and Pima Community College, we are collecting the diversity of bees in the Sonoran Desert.

And we're sequencing one gene from every single species.

And that's creating this reference library of gene sequences for those species so that in the future, we could then collect a flower, and instead of sampling the bees, we can wash the DNA off that flower and see if those bees have visited that flower.

Sort of like forensics.

♪ ♪ JOHN ZADROZNY: Right now, we're over a thousand species of bees around here, and still every once in a while we get a new one that no one's ever seen before.

And so, we catch bees, have to label what day, what time, what type of plant it's on, and then we will go into some further identification.

♪ ♪ GENE HALL: We go to great lengths to protect specimens.

Some specimens in this collection go back to the 1880s.

And if you think about it, if you lose or destroy a specimen, you can't go back to, let's say, Mount Lemmon in 1942 and recollect it.

And so, that tells you that each specimen represents a unique event in space and time that you can't duplicate.

And that's why we go to great lengths to protect these for researchers to use now and in perpetuity.

♪ ♪ It's the largest collection in the world of Arizona and Northern Sonoran Desert insects.

We have around 3 million specimens, and it's kind of the hub for documenting the biodiversity for the region.

CHARLES BRADLEY: This is the initial step in the whole barcoding of the bee biodiversity.

We will get a drawer of bees, just like you see here, and then we only need to take one leg off of them to actually do the whole process.

We'll put it through a suite of chemical processes to extract and refine the DNA, which eventually comes over here to this device, our Nanopore sequencer.

And this will actually pull the DNA through a series of minute, microscopic pores, and that will get turned into an electrical signal.

The software then can translate these electrical spikes and to output these, one singular sequence, really high quality sequence, and that will be the representative of the species itself.

TANNER BLAND: Honeybees, they're interesting for a lot of reasons.

So, they're an invasive species.

They've been here for about 400 years, if not longer.

They were brought over by the Spanish and English when they colonized America.

So, honey trade was pretty big back then, and they wanted to maintain it in the new world, but that caused a lot of problems.

The only group of social bees we have in the United States are bumblebees and they form relatively small colonies.

Honeybees are very different.

You could have 30, 40,000 sisters working in a colony together, all competing for native bees, for pollen and nectar resources.

So, they could totally devastate local resources and make it essentially a desert for any other organism to access.

♪ ♪ Honeybees cannot pollinate tomatoes.

Tomatoes originated in South America and eventually made their way north into North America and diversified into tons of different groups.

Here in the Sonoran Desert we have many, many, many species in a similar genus as to tomatoes, things like eggplants, chilies, etcetera.

Bumblebees can pollinate these plants because they're able to detach the muscles they use for flight from their wings, and so they use that to vibrate almost like a jackhammer, and that's because they're ground nesting a lot of the time.

They use that vibration as like a jackhammer to loosen the soil as they dig.

Honeybees usually don't nest in the ground, they're usually nesting in cavities, and so they don't need that adaptation.

And so, bees that have that adaptation have now reused it to access pollen in these very particular flowers that is inaccessible to any other insect.

I'd be remiss not to talk about what I think is the most interesting group of bees in the world, and that's the genus, Perdita, or the fairy bees, the smallest bees on the planet.

In fact, the smallest species in the world occurs only in the Sonoran Desert, and part of the Mojave Desert.

They're two millimeters long, and they only pollinate plants like this.

This is rattlesnake weed, Euphorbia albomarginata.

And this bee only visits this flower for pollen and nectar.

So, I think it's just a testament to how there's all of these important interactions that are happening literally under our noses, and we have no idea that they're going on, and they're vastly understudied.

So, how important are they to sustaining much of the population of plants that we see around us?

Not just the big, conspicuous, pretty cacti or bushes or shrubs, but also the mat-forming plants, the tiny things that are growing underneath all of the other, you know, big, conspicuous things.

The bees that visit these flowers are in the genus Diadasia.

They're called the "cactus" and "mallow bees" or the "teddy bear bees."

And we think they're fairly good habitat indicators because they visit a lot of the most iconic plants of the Sonoran Desert.

Things like saguaro, cholla, prickly pear, and globe mallows.

They're fluffy, fluffy and cute.

It's so hot, right?

You don't wanna have hair all of your body.

♪ ♪ KIM: One reason that we're concerned about climate change and its impact on bees and plants, because the plants depend on the bees and vice versa.

So, if those bees emerge from underground because they receive certain cues, and the plants that they depend on are not available, well, the bees are not going to find the food that they need to provision for the next generation of bees.

♪ ♪ The idea for the Desert Museum was that we would teach people about the beauty of the desert and the value that it has, and how to live in harmony with the desert instead of converting the desert, transforming it into something that was more familiar to people from other parts of the country.

The desert is huge, and so, to see that full diversity, you'd have to spend several weeks traveling around the Sonoran Desert region.

But here you can see it all in a single day.

So yeah, we're hoping that people fall in love with the desert, and that's how we're going to conserve biodiversity.

If people love it.

♪ ♪ JENNIE: Jaguars, bobcats, ocelots, and mountain lions, all roam Arizona.

Thanks to Wild Cat Researchers and citizen scientists, we know more about these elusive animals than ever before.

♪ ♪ SUSAN MALUSA: We know that mountain lions and jaguars like to use these wildlife corridors.

They like this rough terrain.

It's a site that has a corridor that leads to water that crosses the landscape.

I look at elevation, distance to water, distance to human activity.

We just got another jaguar detection, 221 detections, which is a lot, probably the most of any project in the U.S.

But in comparison we have millions of images.

A lot of different things we see, and we can learn from, but as far as getting a jaguar detection, they're not as frequent.

I look at the camera and I'm like, "Wow, a mountain lion just was here five minutes before me," and that's really exciting.

LAUREL FROELICH: It's like Christmas morning when you come up and, like, look at the pictures, "What did I get?"

Sometimes you have, like, 10,000 photos to go through, but it's awesome.

♪ ♪ SUSAN: Well, this project's been going on for 15 years, and to involve the community has been a great way to let others know that jaguars still roam the mountains of Southern Arizona.

This is the northern extent of their range, but historically they were here, and it is important that these corridors remain open for a balanced ecosystem.

We need these species to move across the landscape without anything blocking that.

HANK HARLOW: I am a physiological ecologist.

What I do is I kind of look at animal adaptations to stressful environments, whether it's hot environments, cold environments, you know, the stress of people being in their habitat, and look at spatial and energy needs of animals.

I retire, and then I move from Wyoming down to Tucson and then I hear about this project for Citizen Science volunteers, and once you work on wildlife, you know, it's like you never wanna give up.

And so, it was an opportunity to be a data collector once again.

It's not just, you know, presence or absence of these spotted cats, because that's another facet of this whole study.

It's whether the spotted cats are there, then it's this data acquisition of all this other wildlife.

What does the jaguar share in terms of the mammals and the birds and the reptiles and amphibians on that particular spot?

TIM COOK: We're a group of volunteers that dedicate our time, energy, money, effort into going out and doing any kind of research sampling for the project.

Mostly checking cameras, but I also do some of the tracking and I've found jaguar scat in the past as well.

That's the jaguar's poop.

[chuckles] You have to do a lot of research about the terrain, the habitat, the vegetation, elevation.

You start with some clues that there's a jaguar there.

We get those from various sources, Border Patrol is a good source, just rumors, anecdotal sightings and things like that.

So, we just try to get a camera out in that location.

We know we're not seeing the same animal because we can compare the spots of the different animals.

Typically, we've had about one jaguar at a time and one ocelot at a time.

The jaguar population exists all the way from South America up through Mexico, and just a tiny fraction into the United States.

The border wall is obviously the most difficult challenge that faces the jaguars right now.

I think they are slowly coming back to the U.S.

European settlers extirpated most things as they did over the years, and we lost them, and now they're slowly coming back.

If we let them come back, I think they will, even on their own, even if we don't do any reintroduction programs.

HANK: And the thing about keeping this a "secret" is the fact that now it's a free-ranging animal, and we haven't affected it in any way.

We haven't drawn attention to it.

We get that picture that we share amongst ourselves, but you don't have a timestamp, you don't have a location stamp.

So, it's not giving those locations.

But all that data, you know, that we really laboriously go through on determining what wildlife is out there, that is going to be made onto a public domain.

So, that's an open-source data set that can be searched, it can be downloaded, it can be used by NGOs, by other federal and state agencies, by students perhaps, you know, that are on campus.

Of course, the other one is that genetic component.

♪ ♪ SUSAN: eDNA is environmental DNA.

So, people are familiar with hearing, "Oh, we did a DNA sample," a swab or hair or whatever they use, blood, tissue.

And environmental DNA is just taking from the water.

♪ ♪ I think this would be a good spot right here to do some eDNA sampling.

It's somewhat shaded so it doesn't break down as much.

And as we've looked here, we've seen some tracks and our camera upstream has previously had jaguar detection.

[motor whirring] So, with eDNA sampling, we can sample the water or the sediment.

We take it back and just like we look at our photos, we can compare what species walked through that puddle or took a drink there.

HANK: eDNA is becoming a really strong, strong environmental tool, and we're really fortunate to be able to, you know, have that.

So, you have the volunteers taking the pictures, and now you have the geneticists, not only telling us what individual it is, but telling us and validating what animals are out there sharing that space.

LAUREL: I started on this project when I was 8, so about, like, 15 years ago with my mom going out in the field just doing -- SUSAN: It was your Saturdays.

LAUREL: Yeah, that was my Saturdays.

Going out in the field, setting up cameras.

I'd get so excited going home, checking all the pictures and everything, sorting them.

The biggest benefit to, you know, going out in the field and being together and doing this, it really bonds you, you know.

It's quite exciting having this work to share together.

My mom showing us the importance of, you know, being out here and, like, stewards of the land and the animals.

And being out there and seeing that there's so much more than what is just directly in front of us is incredibly impactful, and it's changed my life.

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