How Tumamoc Hill's new director plans to bring the desert to the people
As director of the Desert Laboratory on Tumamoc Hill, Elise Gornish blends the university's renowned research on desert landscapes with its commitment to community outreach. "I'm trying to maximize every aspect of that," she said.
Courtesy of Elise Gornish
New York City is perhaps an unexpected place to become an ecologist, and a marketing job for the clothing brand FUBU is an even more unexpected stepping stone to get there.
But that's where Elise Gornish was in the early 2000s, fresh out of undergrad with degrees in English and business, and a seemingly cool job in the city.
It wasn't going great.
"It sounds very corny, but I wasn't being fulfilled," Gornish said. "I'd already started seeing my friends, who were like 22, living for the nights and weekends. I said, 'That doesn't make any sense. You spend 80% of your day at work.'"
Gornish pulled out a piece of paper and wrote down things she liked to do: Eat ice cream. Be alone. Look at plants. A rough image of a forest ranger – a forest ranger eating ice cream, maybe – appeared in Gornish's mind. She Googled how to become one. She also Googled what ecology was, because she hadn't taken any of those classes.
She has since taken many – Gornish returned to school and earned a doctorate in ecology from Florida State University – and has become an expert on how to manage dry landscapes. Gornish came to the university in 2017, and is an associate professor in the School of Natural Resources and the Environment and an associate specialist in Cooperative Extension.
"My job is basically to help people make good decisions to steward their land in a changing environment," she said. And, yes – it's fulfilling. "It makes me feel good about what I do."
And that's how Gornish, a native New Yorker, came to lead the university's Desert Laboratory on Tumamoc Hill, where she became director in August. Her role leading a century-old lab on a locally beloved 830-acre preserve on Tucson's west side blends the university's renowned research on desert landscapes with its commitment to community outreach.
"I'm trying to maximize every aspect of that," Gornish said. "We're trying to engage more researchers on the hill, and I want to radically expand the type of outreach we're doing."
Most locals likely know Tumamoc Hill, near North Silverbell and West Anklam roads on Tucson's west side, for the 1.5-mile walking path that takes about 1,000 visitors each day up to a roughly 700-foot summit. The hill has been continuously used by humans for 4,000 years, and is a prominent cultural site for the Tohono O'odham Nation, who call the hill Cemamagi Du'ag, or Horned Lizard Mountain.
The Desert Laboratory, housed in the stone buildings halfway up the hill, has studied the ecology of the Sonoran Desert since 1903.
Photo by Paul Mirocha
Andrew Carnegie originally established the lab, which takes up the stone buildings that walkers pass about halfway up the hill, in 1903 to study desert botany. It came under federal management before being transferred to the university in 1956. The Arizona Institute for Resilience now manages the lab on Tumamoc Hill in partnership with Pima County.
Gornish admits that, while she knew about ongoing research at the lab, her connection to it for several years was as just another walker. Over time, she learned how foundational the lab was for the field of ecology.
"Ecology kind of was born there," Gornish said, noting that the field's flagship journal, called Ecology, started as a magazine called The Plant World and was run by Desert Lab researchers. "The study of arid-land ecology started there, without question."
The lab's data about saguaros – researchers began monitoring the hill's 4,000 saguaros in 1909 – is one of the oldest continuously monitored plant datasets in the world.
Gornish aims to keep that research mission alive while finding ways to get hill visitors engaged beyond the workout. In early March, the hill hosted a "Plant-stravaganza" event where visitors could learn from Gornish and colleagues about desert foliage. The event included children's activities and giveaways.
"It was something that a walker who did not come to the hill for the event could still quickly enjoy," said Gornish, who spent the day herding skeptical walkers into the event and watched many of them leave excited about all that they'd learned about native vegetation.
"We're really trying to engage a broader group of people," she added.
Gornish also has set up a seed library, where hill visitors can get free seeds for native Sonoran Desert plants and information to help grow them. And she has plans to expand the youth-focused and arts-based programming on the hill.
She also encourages anyone interested to keep an eye on the Desert Lab's calendar and Instagram account, or sign up for its email list. And those interested in getting more deeply involved in the hill, she said, should consider becoming a Tumamoc Steward, volunteers who walk the hill to answer visitors' questions.
For a lab that's spent more than a century researching mostly plants, its focus, Gornish said, is on delivering that research to people – the work that she learned years ago was so fulfilling.
"Part of the reason why the Desert Laboratory exists and why the university supports it is for connection to community," Gornish said. "If the community is there and is asking, 'what's that bird' or 'why do those plants do that,' it is our job to get information to them. If there's something people want to see, they should tell us."