Evolutionary Ecologist Diane Campbell and Design Researcher Eliza Collin Simulate the Future at RMBL

Three years ago, during a residency at the Design Museum in London, design researcher Eliza Collin was developing a new project about olfactory evolution and looking for scientists studying how climate change affects the scent of flowers. Her search led her to evolutionary ecologist Diane Campbell, who has been conducting research at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory (RMBL) since 1984. The resulting collaboration has grown from a series of conversations across the Atlantic into an ongoing partnership spanning evolutionary ecology, design, film, and science communication.

Simulating the Future

At RMBL, Campbell has spent decades studying scarlet gilia (Ipomopsis aggregata) and related wildflowers, building one of the longest-running data sets of its kind.

“I study how plants evolve under real conditions in nature, and I’ve looked at that from a variety of angles over the last 40 years out at RMBL,” she says. 

During that time, she and her students have studied everything from pollinators’ responses to flower traits —  such as the flowers’ shape, scent, and nectar — to how leaf shape and the ability to photosynthesize affect survival. 

“What we’re working on now is how changes in environmental conditions as a result of climate change alter the way that plants look because of direct responses to the environment or because of evolution. We have roughly a 25-year data set on natural selection and changes in leaf and flower traits,” Campbell says. “One thing we know is that earlier snowmelt is endangering the populations.”

Among the central questions now is whether plants can evolve quickly enough to survive those increasingly challenging conditions.

“It’s called evolutionary rescue,” Campbell explains. “It’s literally evolution rescuing the population from poor environmental conditions.”

When Collin reached out to Campbell, Campbell was in her last term of teaching before retiring from the University of California, Irvine. With her schedule about to become more flexible, Campbell found herself increasingly interested in expanding the audience for her research, so Collin’s timing was fortuitous. “I thought I would really like to do something that connected a little more with the wider public,” she says.

Campbell did more than share her expertise with Collin. “She introduced me to a new way of doing science,” says Collin. “She was simulating the future outside of the lab! Due to collaborations with other scientists, I was already thinking about how scent was changing and whether we could smell the difference. But Diane’s research was uniquely impressive. With that much data, maybe we could also see these changes if we modeled her findings into future scenarios.”

In the months that followed, Collin worked with Campbell, animator Alexander Pannier, botanical illustrator Jessica Francis, and other scientists to create a multimedia installation that invited visitors to see how an Ipomopsis hybrid might evolve over the next century in response to a changing climate. The work was displayed alongside an installation that imagined how the scents of species of Jasminum and Campanula would change with increased heat and drought conditions, and a garden plan designed to enable resilience in plant species through gene exchange and potential hybridization.

Video: 100-Year Evolution of the Ipomopsis Hybrid (2024), a collaboration among Eliza Collin, Dr. Diane Campbell, Jessica Francis, and Alexander Pannier. Video courtesy of Eliza Collin

From London to Gothic

Thousands of museumgoers were introduced to Collin and Campbell’s collaboration through the London exhibit, yet Collin had never set foot in Colorado, nor had Campbell visited the Design Museum. The collaboration expanded after Collin visited RMBL for the first time two summers ago. She and her partner landed in Gothic after a road trip through the American Southwest, pitching a tent in a meadow.

“We arrived just as the sun was going down. No one was around, so we set up our tent in this big wildflower meadow in full bloom where the pitch sites are. This turned out to be one of Diane’s research meadows,” she says.

What she found at RMBL struck her profoundly.

“There’s this shared energy toward something bigger,” she says. “It’s wonderful — like some kind of utopia.”

Although Collin’s visit lasted just a few days, the experience led to a deeper partnership with Campbell and scientist Paul CaraDonna, founder of RMBL’s Art/Science Exchange. Since 2013, the exchange has brought together artists and scientists to explore how their collaboration can broaden understanding of, and engagement with, nature. For Collin, the exchange has created space for conversations that might not happen in more traditional research settings.

“I’ve felt so well received, and really inspired, and really supported, and the scientists have been really open to my point of view,” she says.

Last summer, Collin returned with a small film crew (including writer-director Federico Barni) to document Campbell’s work studying hybrid wildflowers around Gothic. The result is an ongoing semi-fictional film project that blends documentary footage with a narrative set in the future. Shot on 16-mm film and filled with scientists collecting floral scent samples and studying hybrid plants at high-elevation research sites, the film imagines a future narrator reflecting on the research taking place at RMBL today. At its center is Campbell’s search to understand whether plants can adapt quickly enough to survive a changing climate.

“It’s absolute visual gold dust, watching scientists doing their work,” Collin says.

During that visit, Collin also conducted a workshop with undergraduate students and several principal investigators. “We collectively imagined what they thought the future was going to be like, based on their research,” Collin says. “Their research is very situated within a future, but they don’t necessarily have the opportunity to stop and think, ‘What is that future going to be like?'” For Collin, that kind of reflection is one of the really valuable contributions artists can make to scientific research. She says artists — and, in her case, designers — can help scientists think beyond a single project and consider how their work connects to larger social, cultural, and environmental questions while also contributing to the future of design.

For Campbell, the collaboration has certainly offered a fresh perspective. “It does make me think a lot more about how to present [my research] to non-scientists, and what sorts of things people might be interested in,” she says. It has also planted seeds for their continued collaboration. “The populations themselves are changing, and so the whole feel of the meadow is different. I think it would be interesting to try to capture that visually,” she muses.

Collin plans to return to RMBL this July for a two-week stay. While her first visit was brief and her second focused on film production, she says she is eager to experience more time in the field, doing hands-on science. She and CaraDonna are also discussing a new workshop focused on ecological futures, building on conversations about how scientists think about the future worlds their research seeks to understand.

“RMBL is an incredibly unique place, the way it’s exploring art/science,” Collin says. “I’m having conversations with other scientists around the world now, and RMBL’s reputation for this kind of thing precedes itself, and people are excited to see how it develops, and [want] to model it. I think that’s really a testament to the great work that RMBL is doing.”

— Suzanne Ennis
RMBL Communications Manager

Top: Eliza Collin (left) and Diane Campbell. Photo courtesy of Eliza Collin