Water from Desert Air: Tracking Emerging Innovations
When we think of aquatic diversity, we often think of colorful coral reefs, clear tropical streams, and other water-saturated landscapes. But there is another, somewhat surprising eco-region that hosts a unique aquatic fauna: deserts. From 2000 through 2008, I worked for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in the field on desert fishes, frogs, and wetland plants, most of which are imperiled, in the American Southwest and adjacent parts of Mexico. As you might guess, the loss of aquatic habitats to diversions, poor land-use habits, and groundwater pumping are big problems for fish and other aquatic species in a landscape of extremely limited water. Restoring natural hydrological processes harmed by past practices and finding solutions to ongoing threats to aquatic habitats is essential to conserving this unique part of wildlife diversity.
At the Center for Conservation Innovation (CCI) at Defenders of Wildlife, we’re always keeping our eyes, ears, and brains open to emerging ideas that may affect (positively or negatively) conservation, especially in fields outside of biology. Recently, researchers from University of California, Berkeley, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia published a chemistry paper that caught my attention. They report on two “Metal-Organic Frameworks” that are capable of producing water from desert air — with humidity ranging from 5% in the day to 40% at night — using only sunlight and natural cooling for energy. The volumes of water produced in this experiment aren’t huge, but it seems like this work is a significant advance. These frameworks may be the foundation of a technology-enabled alternative to dewatering rivers like the Gila, Salt, Colorado, and Yaqui that harbor unique biological diversity in the aridlands.
GENERAL SCIENCE NOTE: We focus on conservation science at CCI and Defenders, but in this day and age it is essential to highlight the general importance of basic science to society. The research reported in this post was funded in part by grants from the National Science Foundation and by funding to Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, and it may one day lead to previously unimagined solutions to the challenge of limited water in the desert. Use every opportunity you have to help support science, from backing research grants to encouraging science-based decisions in carrying out the Endangered Species Act…you never know where it might lead.
While we’re always looking for new technology that can improve conservation, we also evaluate new conservation challenges that might arise from the same technologies. For example, assuming one of these new compounds were suitable to be mass-produced and deployed to provide a significant source of water from air in the desert, we would have to consider from where the materials would come. What landscapes would need to be mined for the zirconium, aluminum, and other elements used to create the compounds developed in this research? In an effort to save water for fishes here, would we create a mining disaster for species like the dunes sagebrush lizard elsewhere? Would deploying these imagined watering stations create new direct threats to wildlife? Many more questions will need to be asked and answered as this and other technologies emerge.
Defenders and CCI don’t develop new compounds like these, but we do keep an eye out for exactly these kinds of novel developments. I don’t know much about emerging topics in chemistry, but I think we can all appreciate that having more water in desert ponds and streams will be good for the fish and other desert wetland wildlife if Metal-Organic Frameworks can reduce the need to pump and modify natural systems. As new solutions arise, we’ll be here on the cutting edge, evaluating the potential benefits and costs of technologies for wildlife. And when species benefit, we’ll advocate for those technologies that help conserve my “friends” the Yaqui chub and Huachuca water umbel; the Apache and Gila trout in the mountains; and other desert fishes that my Defenders colleagues are working to protect.
