Date/Time
Date - 03/12/2016
2:00 pm - 3:30 pm
Location
Brewster Chapel, Plymouth MA
Living Observatory at Tidmarsh Farms: Documenting a Restoration in Progress
Tidmarsh Farms in the fog. Photo courtesy of G. Davenport.
Glorianna Davenport, a trustee of Tidmarsh Farms in Manomet, Massachusetts, has undertaken an ambitious project to restore 250 acres of a cranberry farm to naturally-functioning wetlands. Hand in hand with the restoration, she has launched a Living Observatory, recording the changing landscape over time and presenting its past, present and future states in an innovative on-line virtual space.
Glorianna collects seeds of American white cedar for propagation. Photo credit: Alex Hackman.
As you will hear in her presentation, Living Observatory is an initiative for documenting and interpreting ecological change that allows people, individually and collectively, to better understand the relationships between ecological processes, human lifestyle choices, and climate change adaptation. Grounded in the collection of local observations, Living Observatory geocodes a place – Tidmarsh Farms – over time with rich media, such as audio, video, text annotations, and output from environmental sensors, providing both a physical and virtual venue for exploration, sharing and learning about ecology.
Glorianna Davenport is a co-founder of the MIT Media Lab. Trained as a sculptor and documentary filmmaker, she has achieved international recognition for her work in digital media forms. She holds a B.A. in English from Mt. Holyoke College, and an M.A. from Hunter College.
Glorianna retired from MIT in 2008 to devote herself full-time to Tidmarsh Farms and the Living Observatory, bringing her media and management expertise to bear on the challenge of communicating complex ecological processes and concepts in the context of a landscape scale restoration to diverse audiences.
For more information on Glorianna’s projects, click here.
Please pre-register for the talk to receive an email reminder about it a few days before and a message if it is postponed due to snow.