Plotting Spruce History

Watercolor and Colored Pencil, 2021

Collaboration with scientist Dr. Laura Parducci

Climate change artist Jill Pelto has been collaborating with an international science team for the last few years. The team is based in Sweden, Norway, and Italy. The primary collaborator on this project is Dr. Laura Parducci, a paleo-ecologists currently based in Rome. Jill created five paintings for the team that tell a story about how Laura and her co-workers do their field research, what they find, how they use the data, and why that’s important today.

This painting is the fourth painting in the series — depicting a map of Norway, Sweden, Finland, and other northern European countries. Data points on the map are depicted as the pollen grains for the spruce tree (Picea abies L. Karst) — these show where sediment cores have been taken. The colors represent what information the pollen revealed: the time when spruce populated the region, indicating that ice was gone. Light yellow is modern and dark blue is 10,000 years ago. So, over this long time period the spruce slowly wrapped their way north and around the landmass, colonizing where the ice had melted. I painted spruce in the foreground. I wanted to communicate that habitat zones have shifted dramatically over time, and that we can expect this to occur again now. Credit for the original map goes to Giesecke and Bennett, 2004.

https://laurap.it/events

Data Reference:

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1365-2699.2004.01095.x