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. In association with the 50th anniversary of the Clean Water Act, the Paul Smith’s College Adirondack Watershed Institute has embarked on a collaborative fiber arts project supported by the Champlain Valley National Heritage Partnership to showcase the legacy of protecting clean water in the Lake Champlain Basin and beyond.

Raquette Lake water quality has been monitored by AWI and Adirondack Lake Assessment Program (ALAP) volunteers since 2003 and occurrence of several important boreal bird species has been monitored in multiple bogs and fens in the Raquette watershed during the same time period. This piece combines information from both monitoring programs to represent long-term changes in Raquette and its watershed. Transparency is the measurement of water clarity and light penetration into the surface of a lake and is measured using a Secchi disk and assessing the depth to which the disk is visible in the water column. Transparency has exhibited a pattern of decline in this and several ALAP lakes since the inception of the program. Similarly, boreal bird populations have exhibited a pattern of decline in this region and others in the park. The decline of boreal birds is most likely the result of climate change, among other factors. Declining lake transparency may be associated with climate change, but it may also indicate a positive trend of recovery from acidification.

Data: Laxson et al. 2019 https://www.adkwatershed.org/sites/default/files/alap_201... and Glennon et al. 2019 https://www.adkwatershed.org/sites/default/files/glennon_...

Pattern: improvised from the basic free log cabin knit shawl pattern from Yarnspirations https://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/log-cabin-shawl-6 with colors representing declining levels of lake transparency (blue) and boreal bird occurrence (green). I think log cabin works really well with Tunisian crochet and I could easily keep adding rows/data to this as long as we continue to monitor the lake.