When you’re walking over the desert soil, you’re walking over huge amounts of fungi. These fungi are connected to the roots of grasses and shrubs, gathering the nutrients these plants need to survive. Here, we speak with world renowned soil ecologist Dr. Nancy Johnson and hear about the evolutionary past and current roles of these understudied and truly fascinating organisms.

The geology of the Colorado Plateau is amazingly exposed and incredibly dramatic. Here, we get to hear about the forces and slow passage of time that shaped the Plateau as we see it today. We hear from Drs. Scott Ritter and Tom Morris as they walk us through iconic and lesser known places, describing why our landscape looks like the way it does.

In the deserts, the soil surface is alive. The soil is covered with lichens, mosses, cyanobacteria, algae, fungi and other microorganisms that together are called biological soil crusts. Here, we talk with Dr. Matthew Bowker who studies these cryptic communities and works to put them back into the landscape.

Humans have been using and modifying the ecosystems around on the Colorado Plateau for thousands of years. To understand human relationships with the land, we talk with Kate Magargal, who combines archaeology and ecology to ask how people who lived in the Southwest interacted with the landscape around them, specifically through gathering food, wood, and using fire as a tool. We explore what her findings can tell us about how to manage our landscapes into the future.

Cheatgrass is one of the most pervasive, non-native grasses in the American West, changing ecosystems almost everywhere it goes. Here, we talk with Dr. Jayne Belnap, a world renowned scientist from Moab, Utah, who has studied how this invasive grass has changed ecosystems around the Southwest. We talk about where cheatgrass came from, how it got here, and how it has and will likely continue to transform southwestern landscapes.

This show examines how people living in the desert southwest in the past may have differentiated between communal places where everyone was welcome, and private places like granaries and dwellings. Through studying these differentiations, Elizabeth Hora-Cook tries to understand what society may have been like for Fremont and Ancestral Puebloan people.

A show about Southwestern archaeology and paleoethnobotany, or the study of plants that past humans have used, with Dr. Timothy Riley. Rose Elgholff talks to Dr. Riley about ways to figure out what humans ate in the past, why we care about it, and work he has done with experimental archaeology today.

Exploring strategies to protect plant and animal species by protecting diverse landscapes with Dr. Paul Beier.

The second part of a two part interview about volcanoes on the Colorado Plateau, how they interact with the ecosystem, why there are so many, and how humans may have responded to the eruptions, with Dr. Michael Ort.

An interview about the different ways herbivores influence plant communities in our region and the different impacts of native and nonnative grazers with Dr. Kari Veblen .