Imperiled Ecosystems in a Shifting Climate
2016 Atlantic White Cedar Symposium
May 24-26, 2016

Hotel 1620, 180 Water St., Plymouth, MA

Living Observatory: a collaborative for capturing, interpreting and revealing change across a large-scale wetland restoration project

Glorianna Davenport
President, Living Observatory
gid@media.mit.edu
617 642 7934

Abstract

Large-scale ecological wetland restorations such as the Tidmarsh Farms Restoration Project generate an unusual time-zero moment of human intervention in which a landscape framed by one regime (in this case cranberry farming) is transformed to another, presumably more natural riverine and wetland regime. Such a transformation inspires human curiosity as well as scientific inquiry.  How and what can we learn from these restorations?  How can we make the next one better? How can we share the excitement and mysteries of a landscape “becoming” with others?  This talk will introduce Living Observatory (LO), a non-profit (pending), learning collaborative of scientists, artists, wetland restoration practitioners engaged in documenting, interpreting and revealing aspects of ecological change as it takes place at Tidmarsh Farms, and at future ecological wetland restoration sites. The broad goals of LO are to develop a long-term (20 year) multi-faceted study of the site, and to create experiences that allow the public to better understand relationships between ecological processes, human lifestyle choices, and climate change adaptation. Individual projects are selected based on review of a proposal detailing goals, methods, expected outcomes and instrumentation. Some past and current projects involve novel instrumentation such as low-power environmental sensing, multi-track audio streaming, infra-red and aerial photograph/video.  All participants agree to LO’s shared data policy, participate in regular research meetings, and in larger, more public LO Summits.

Glorianna Davenport is founder and president of Living Observatory, a non-profit research center dedicated to the science, interpretation and experience of restored wetland landscapes. Trained as a documentary filmmaker and technologist, Davenport is a founding member of the MIT Media Laboratory (Cambridge, Massachusetts) where she currently holds the appointment of Visiting Research Scientist. A trustee of Tidmarsh Farms (Manomet, Massachusetts), Davenport has worked for the past decade with her husband, Evan Schulman, three children and a variety of federal, state and local partners to comprehensively restore and transition their 600 acre cranberry farm into a nature sanctuary.  Davenport is a recipient of MIT's Gyorgy Kepes Fellowship Award for Excellence in the Arts.