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.

Climate change is among the greatest threats to our aquatic ecosystems and is also a threat to the winter regional economy in the Adirondack Park. This piece is meant to represent the impact of warming winter temperatures on ice fishing and is based on the research of Lesley Knoll et al. (2019), and their work examining the cultural impact of ice loss on inland lakes and rivers. She and her colleagues found that ice fishing tournaments were more likely to be cancelled in central Minnesota when average winter air temperatures were about 25 degrees or higher. Though long-term ice fishing tournament records are hard to come by, this scarf represents the application of the same 25 degree threshold to our region. Each hole represents a winter since 1899 and those ringed with blue are winters in which the average winter temperature (December - February) was 25 or higher in one or more of the NY Champlain, NY Northern Plateau, or VT Western climate regions.

I used the Swiss Cheese scarf pattern and felted the resulting scarf, embellishing the warmer winters with embroidery. Regional time series data from NOAA https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cag/regional/time-series/101/ta...