Complex Ecosystems
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ROM’s newest exhibition, Earth: An Immersive Journey,
ROM’s newest exhibition, Earth: An Immersive Journey, is the Museum’s most experiential and immersive in its 110-year history. Through a combination of high-definition projections, spatial audio, and scent diffusions, Earth gives visitors the sense of traversing some of the planet’s most intriguing and biodiverse habitats.
One such habitat is deep underneath the earth, amid a tangle of roots, fungi, and worms. Another is a wooded bat trail in which you perceive the world the way bats do—via echolocation. The hope is that visitors will lose themselves in a symphony of life and gain a greater appreciation of the intricate interactions that sustain our planet.
“My research requires periodic immersion in Earth’s most biodiverse ecosystems in a way that gives me a nuanced, intimate perspective,” says Dr. Nathan K. Lujan, lead curator of the exhibition and ROM’s Curator of Fishes, who often spends weeks at a time conducting fieldwork in remote areas of the Amazon. “The personal connection to those habitats and species fuels my research. It is a joy, but also an urgent challenge to give the general public access to experiences that motivate conservation. I think that’s what this exhibition provides—a really unique opportunity, and distinctive approach, to sensing what it’s like to be surrounded by the exuberance of life.”
For Dr. Lujan, protecting biodiversity is a two-pronged approach.
For Dr. Lujan, protecting biodiversity is a two-pronged approach. The first, which is directed at the public and includes exhibitions like Earth: An Immersive Journey, is aesthetic, wholistic, and experiential. The second is deconstructive, specifically, researching, collecting, and cataloguing freshwater fishes.
“Given the challenges we face cataloguing biodiversity at a rate commensurate with the loss of biodiversity, we have to really scale up with a new technology,” says Dr. Lujan.
Enter environmental DNA, or eDNA, a revolutionary new means of detecting the many diverse species living in an aquatic habitat by examining only small samples of river water. This new technology is a fixture of Dr. Lujan’s work at ROM. It’s also the subject of a new 10-minute documentary, Decoding Biodiversity, written and directed by his former student intern Illian Brasselet.
Watch it below—and learn more about what ROM and Dr. Lujan are doing to both protect biodiversity and gain a deeper understanding of the complex ecosystems featured in Earth: An Immersive Journey.
