Field Fellows — work on measured living systems

How the work is supervised.

A small institute. Every scope has one supervising instructor and one named deliverable, and mail to this address is answered by the person responsible for it.

Research direction Instruction & standards Every scope is supervised directly. Methods, sequence, and the completion standard are written before work begins.
Mission & partners Programs Grant work, partner institutions, and the community side of the practice.
Plant medicine research The living record Palette, ethnobotany, and the plant side of the land record.

We build water systems — acequias, bioswales, closed-loop fountains, cast stone — and we keep a measured record of what they do afterward. The building is not the constraint. The record is.

There is more work here than one practice can carry: entries to write, literature to review, ground to map, Spanish to translate, footage to cut. That is what this page is for.

What needs doing.

Real scopes, two to six weeks each, one named deliverable, your name published on it. Take one.

SourceLibrary entries. ~1,200 words, cited, from published sources. English or Spanish. The library runs 36 entries across four tracks and needs more.
ResearchLiterature reviews. Measured performance of traditional gravity irrigation — infiltration, conveyance loss, riparian effect. Annotated, with a short synthesis.
LenguaTranslation, EN→MX Spanish. The Spanish half of this site is thinner than the English half. That is a problem worth fixing.
DataGIS & base maps. QGIS from public data and provided coordinates. Site boundaries only, no client names.
FilmMedia editing. Drone and build footage into short cuts. Paid when it extends past a first scope.
LettersResearch & correspondence. Finding the right person at the right institution, and drafting the letter that reaches them.
GroundField days, San Antonio. Readings, photographs, notes into the land record. In person, scheduled.

The record you'd be joining.

Curbside bioswale, Alamo Heights — in service since 2025: ~200 gal/hr street drainage absorbed · ~2,000 sq ft standing water relieved field-observed
The Lotus — cast concrete, Hill Country: 28 ft across 8 petals · 9 yd³ in one 6½-hour pour build record
Supportive senior community — closed-loop water: 3 fountains · biochar and lime filtration · one 100-watt array · zero grid draw design spec
702 — ecological training field: 4 trained, three of them veterans · 2 went on to green-industry work outcome
The Source — open methods library: 36 entries, four tracks, bilingual, citable, CC-licensed published

Every figure carries how it was obtained. Field-observed is not a lab test, and we label it that way on the page it appears. The full record →

What we don't have yet.

You are going to check anyway. Here it is first, from us.

No peer-reviewed publications. Open deposits and an open library, not a journal record.
No paired before-and-after dataset from a build site yet. Producing the first one is real work, and it is on this list.
No completed student project to point at. The first person through will be the first person through, and we will say so plainly rather than dress it up.
No formal university partnership. Conversations are open. We will not name an institution as a partner until an agreement says we can.
We are not the heirs of the acequia tradition. Living acequia communities in New Mexico and South Texas — ditch companies, mayordomos, parciantes — hold that knowledge and maintain those systems continuously. We build in that lineage as students of it, we cite it, and we would rather be corrected by those communities than praised for borrowing their language.

For faculty.

If you are considering routing a student here, the practical answers, without you having to ask.

Credit: Your institution grants it, not us. We will never imply otherwise. We supply the site, the data, the supervision hours and the deliverable; your syllabus and your committee define the rest.
Supervision: The principal supervises directly — not a coordinator, not a queue. A weekly check-in, and a person to call between them.
Scope: Two to six weeks, one named deliverable, agreed in writing before it starts. Remote scopes are genuinely remote.
Credentials, stated plainly: We are a design-build practice, not a licensed engineering or landscape-architecture firm. Boundary survey goes to a Texas RPLS; structural and civil work to licensed engineers. We do not supervise anything requiring licensure we do not hold.
Authorship: Published work carries the contributor's byline. Library entries publish under the library's open license. We do not put a student's name on anything they did not write.
Site access & safety: Field days are scheduled, supervised, and optional — every remote scope can be completed without setting foot in Texas. Ask us for current insurance certificates and we will send what we have, exactly as it stands.
Agreements: Send your standard affiliation or service-learning agreement. We sign the university's paper; we do not ask universities to sign ours.
Timing: Fall projects scope in August. Writing in July or early August is the difference between this term and next.

How it works.

Write.
Five sentences about who you are and what you want your hands on, and one link to something you have made. That is the whole application.
Talk.
Twenty minutes on a call, to find the scope that fits. Zoom, or a walk on site if you are close.
Make.
Two to six weeks. One deliverable. A person to call when you are stuck.
Stay.
Published, credited, cited. Bigger scopes follow finished work.

Raise your hand.

Five sentences about what you'd want your hands on, and one link to something you've made. That is the whole application. A person reads every one and answers within three days.

Faculty: fall projects scope in August — write early.