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Timekeepers: The best eco-sensors and last biodiversity frontier in the American West.

Lichens cannot migrate, making them reliant on the rocks or trees to which they’re affixed, where they gauge subtle changes in temperature, humidity, air pollution, and more. They can remind us that survival, rarely solitary, can mean attachment and adaptation. They suggest, too, that life is rarely solitary, and that what appears small or still may be profoundly connected to the fate of an entire landscape. Yet they are often overlooked. Due to lack of attention, visibility, and study, lichens are among the least recognized organisms from a conservation planning perspective and are among the most threatened of any class of organisms. They represent arguably one of the last frontiers of biodiversity discovery for organisms in western North America. To look closely at lichens is therefore to confront a larger question—what else have we failed to see simply because they keep time on a larger timescale?

Project Collaborators

Erin Espelie is an Associate Professor and Chair of Department Chair of Cinema Studies & the Moving Image Arts at ���Ҵ�ý�ƽ������, where she co-founded NEST (Nature, Environment, Science & Technology) Studio for the Arts in 2017. Her films, which ask questions about ways of knowing and “ideas of order,” have shown at the New York Film Festival, SFMoMA, the Museum of the Moving Image, and more.

Erin Manzitto-Tripp is an Associate Professor in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and Curator of Botany at the CU Natural History Museum and Herbarium. She is keenly interested in discovery, documentation, and conservation of the North American lichen biota.

Brad Gallagher is an interactive artist and researcher whose practice engages with the concept of sympoiesis, or ‘making with.’ Through interactive installations and performance interfaces, he explores how movement generates complexity, creativity, and cognition through the entanglement of human and technological actors. To see more of his work, visit: 

Emma Piper-Burket is a visual artist, filmmaker, writer, and educator using fiction, non-fiction, and collected media to investigate interactions between nature, society, and the human spirit. She was a 2024 Flaherty Film Seminar Fellow and has received support from the Sundance Institute, Bemis Center, Visual Studies Workshop, and Light Cone.