Category: Nature

Recyled Christmas Trees Get a New Life – Helping Fish and Wildlife

Recyled Christmas Trees Get a New Life – Helping Fish and Wildlife

In my neighborhood we are starting to see Christmas trees on the curb, ready for pick up. Last year, In 2010, over 27 million Christmas trees were sold.

More communities are recycling Christmas trees – either using them to create mulch, or habitats for animals.

One newer use for recycled Christmas trees is to recycle them to create a better fish habitat.  In South Carolina, Kentucky, Georgia, Montana – and many other locations in the U.S., fish and wildlife agencies have been collecting Christmas trees and putting them in lakes and waterways to create protective habitats for smaller fish.

In some states such as Wyoming, trees will be dropped in holes in the ice at Ocean Lake later this month.  In South Carolina, the trees will be put in Lake Hartwell.

The trees help provide cover for fish, and help promote the growth of fish by providing cover for smaller and younger fish.  The trees also are beneficial for insects that live near water, which is food for many fish.  Lakes often have woody habitats that rot away, and by adding Christmas trees, these types of habitats are replenished.

Other communities, such as Porter County in Indiana have gathered up Christmas trees and piled them up at a 25-acre wildlife rehabilitation site, which provides cover for birds, chipmunks, and other small wild animals.  The trees protect the animals from predators, and also make a shelter in cold weather.

Image Source:

U.S. Forest Service
Mr. Thomas Flickr Site
www.theflyfishingforum.com
www.escobarshighlandfarm.com

Links:

Christmas Trees Get New Life – Augusta Chronicle

Recycle a Christmas Tree – Save a Fish (Department of Fish and Game)

 

Ice Drawings: Jim Denevan and the Largest Piece of Art

Ice Drawings: Jim Denevan and the Largest Piece of Art

The Anthropologist is a project and platform created by the clothing store Anthropologie to show the process of creation and to create relationships with artists.   The main platform for this is the Anthropologiest website and various publications that share selected projects and art as a way to promote creativity.

Last year  The Anthropologist commissioned land artist Jim Denevan to draw on the frozen surface of Lake Baikal in Siberia.   Lake Baikal is the oldest and deepest lakes in the worldand is over 30 million years old. Denevan proposed to make the largest piece of art on the surface of the ice of the lake.

Denevan (who is from Santa Cruz), and his team made marks on nine square miles of ice by making large circles baced on the Fibonacci sequence.  To do the project, the artist and his team had to work in sub-zero temperatures and in strong winds to make the work.

You can see sketches, in-progress images, and film of the project on the site.  There is also a book and DVD about the piece that you can buy at Anthropologie.com.

Is it the largest piece of art?  That’s depends on what you call art – but it sure looks big to me.

Image Source:

The Anthropologist

Links:

The Anthropologist – Jim Denevan Project

Jim Denevan- Artist Site

A View from Inside a Flower:  Rectified Flowers

A View from Inside a Flower: Rectified Flowers

Image rectification is a transformation process where technology is used to combine two or more images into one larger image.  Using mapped coordinates and math equations – the distortion in an image can be transformed and images can be “stitched” together.  Images taken from different perspectives or viewpoints can be made into  one larger image.

In 2010, media artists Golan Levin and Kyle McDonald were reading about domain shifting of polar and Cartesian geometries, and noticed that flowers make interesting subjects for this transformation.

Using Levin’s open-source panoramic-imaging software that he created with some flower photographs from Flickr, they produced “flower panoramas.”

The images were made from Flickr images, and the software is available as free Open Source code.  The software was made with Processing and the the ControlP5 library.

The images created are visualizations of what a person would see from inside a flower.

The resulting images sometimes look like flowers from outer space or a view of a flower as if we are a small insect inside.

Links:

Rectified Flower Images on Flickr

Rectified Flowers page and Software Download

Golan Levin

Kyle McDonald