Mapping in the meantime: on community-engaged research when the ground shifts

In the Sonoran Desert, some seeds can lie in the soil for years without growing. A particular wildflower might need not just rain, but rain of the right duration and at the right temperature, after a long enough cool spell to break its dormancy. If those conditions aren’t met, the seed will simply remain a seed. It could wait a year. It could wait a decade. When the right rain finally falls, the desert blooms in a sudden riot of color, and people travel from across the country to see something that was always there, quietly waiting for its moment. I have been thinking a lot about these seeds this year.

When my fellowship began, I had a clear plan. I wanted to expand the kinds of maps we use to decide where agrivoltaics, the practice of growing crops underneath or around solar panels, should be placed. I planned to weave community voices into a process dominated by large-scale spatial data and technical suitability scores. I hoped to sit down with Arizona community members and Cooperative Extension agents and ask questions that spatial datasets alone struggle to answer. Where do you think solar panels belong? Where would they be welcome, and where would they not? The eventual product was set to be an interactive atlas. This map of the region would not hold a single suitability score, but rather a richer image of where these agrivoltaics systems might belong, the reasoning behind people's assessments, their stories, and the geographies they referenced.

Then the plan changed. The significant shift in federal research priorities and structures rippled through the funding on which my lab’s research depended. A grant that had supported a particular group I had been preparing to collaborate with fell away, and pushing forward in that moment didn’t feel right. It is one thing to ask people for their time and trust when you arrive able to offer something steady in return. It is another to ask after the larger picture has substantially changed shape. Sometimes, relationships have to come before the research, and that means recognizing when you are in a position to collaborate, and when you should take a step back and regroup.

That decision, to regroup and wait, taught me something about community-engaged research that I had understood in theory but felt for the first time in practice. When the structures that hold relationships together are built on funding, the loss of that funding not only disrupts research plans but leaves community partners disappointed too. The people who agree to be part of your research also lose something when conditions shift. Adaptability isn’t a new lesson for researchers; we learned fast and steep lessons during the pandemic. But this past year has been a particularly intense reminder of how much research depends on things far outside of an individual researcher’s control. So, I sat with the disappointment for a while, and then I started working on what I did have control over.

The most significant piece of this year’s work has been building the atlas itself, the skeleton that will structure and hold the interview and workshop findings. It is an interactive map of Arizona, focusing on Maricopa and Cochise counties, with the infrastructure in place for community quotes to surface alongside the landscapes being discussed. It enables stories to live next to the places they belong to, for the reasoning behind people’s assessments to sit on the map itself, rather than in a footnote or nowhere at all. The code is written, ready and waiting to be filled. This is my seed, prepared, planted, waiting for the right conditions.

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To give the atlas its initial shape, I worked with secondary data, including published papers, interviews, and roundtables that other researchers had conducted on the social acceptance of agrivoltaics in the region. These data didn’t directly cover the questions I planned to ask, and as such, they don’t replace the conversations I plan to have. But they touch on many of the same threads, such as land use, who benefits, and what a working landscape is supposed to look like. They let me build the bones of the atlas around real assessments rather than guesses. The structure is one I can feed my own interview and workshop material into when the time comes, without rebuilding from scratch.

Alongside that, I’ve met with other researchers on related mapping projects, trading approaches and offering my experience with building inclusive and appropriate mapping approaches. I’ve also continued separate research with farmworkers on how they experience heat under and around agrivoltaic systems. This work sits in the same broader conversation about who lives with these landscapes and what they have to say. Whilst some of this work is slightly outside the original scope of my fellowship project, it all connects back to the same question: how do we decide where technology is constructed in a way that takes the people who live there into consideration?

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Some of my lab’s funding has recently been restored and the relationships are beginning to be rebuilt. But after this much time, it felt wrong to rush back the moment a budget line reappeared. Trust isn’t reinstated by the same email that reinstates a grant. And so, the atlas continues to wait a little longer for the conversations that will eventually give it meaning. When these conversations happen, I hope the atlas will become a resource that holds community voice alongside the technical conversations where siting decisions are made. It will be a place where someone can see not just whether the sun and soil cooperate, but whether the people who live there see a future for agrivoltaics in their landscapes. There is still work to do to reach this point, but waiting on a seed you know is ready to sprout is very different than waiting with empty hands.