Tree Line Migration

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 fifth and final painting in the series — depicting how Norway Spruce may shift habitat zones as the climate changes rapidly today. The lower portion shows a dense forest of spruce — they stop growing on the mountain side at the tree line (the edge of their habitat.) I chose to make this line a graph of global temperature data from 1880 to 2020. Above this line there may be a few trees, these are usually very old and worn looking (krummholz). These are typically clonal trees, growing from an old root system that has birthed trees for hundreds or even many thousands of years. They persist from times when perhaps the tree line was higher under a different climate, living proof of the resilience of species like Norway Spruce. As temperatures warm and precipitation zones shifts, species like the spruce will have to migrate or adapt to the new conditions. One response may be growing at higher elevations and latitudes.  

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