I am a Senior Research Scientist for the Paul Smith’s College Adirondack Watershed Institute and this is one of several pieces made for a project called Wool and Water.

Wool and Water is a data art project that blends fiber art with scientific data to create visual representations of changing water quality conditions in the Adirondacks and Lake Champlain Basin. We began in 2022 in association with the 50th anniversary of the Clean Water Act. Support from the Lake Champlain Basin Program, the Champlain Valley National Heritage Partnership and others has enabled us to build an enduring project and to use fiber art to showcase the legacy of protecting clean water in the Lake Champlain Basin and beyond. Pieces here in Ravelry are my own but the project website has additional works made by many others as a part of this collaborative effort.

There are 3 examples of Launch Codes here:

Woven - Meacham Lake in the northern Adirondacks is one of approximately 60 lakes monitored by the Adirondack Aquatic Invasive Species Spread Prevention Program of the Paul Smith’s College Adirondack Watershed Institute. Boat launch stewards are located at the New York State boat launch on Meacham to interact with boaters, perform inspections of incoming and outgoing vessels, and help prevent the introduction and spread of aquatic invasive species to waterways across the region. The data woven in this piece represent the record of boats inspected by watershed stewards at Meacham Lake in 2020. We inspected a total of 357 vessels, between 6 June and 30 August, each of which is shown in blue (launching boats) or light green (retrieving boats). Most boats were clean, but bright green stripes represent boats that were found to be carrying aquatic organisms of any kind, and orange stripes represent boats found to be carrying aquatic invasive species (in these cases Eurasian water milfoil and/or curly leaf pondweed). This record of the Meacham launch code was created on a small frame loom and woven with lightweight yarn; it is 16 inches in length. A comparable weaving to represent all of the boats inspected by the stewardship program in 2020 (>110,000) would be 411 feet long.

Data: 2020 New York State Watercraft Inspection Steward Program Application (WISPA) database http://nyis.info/wispa/

Knitted scarf: This one is a snapshot record of launching (green) and retrieving (blue) watercraft on Lake Flower in Saranac Lake during the month of June 2018, and the native (bumpy green) and invasive (bumpy orange) aquatic plants removed from them by boat launch stewards, same watercraft inspection program and data source described above.

Collection of knitted launch codes: This one is a snapshot record of launching (green) and retrieving (blue) watercraft on a collection of Adirondacks lakes on July 4th, 2018, and the native (fuzzy green) and invasive (fuzzy pink) aquatic plants removed from them by boat launch stewards. Length of these pieces reflect the number of boats inspected at each of the launches on this day. Compared to the previous example, which is a temporal record from one lake in the month of June, these are a record from many lakes all on the same day in July, both 2018.