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 collection called Wool and Water.

Wool and Water was developed as a demonstration set to introduce and invite interested makers to join a unique project that blends fiber art with scientific data to create visual representations of changing water quality conditions in the Adirondacks. 2022 is the 50th anniversary of the Clean Water Act and we will be embarking 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.

Dissolved oxygen is a fundamental characteristic of lake ecosystems and an important water quality parameter because it drives the distribution of organisms and affects the solubility of important inorganic nutrients such as phosphorus. The primary source of oxygen in a lake is the atmosphere and, as a consequence, lakes in a stratified condition have a hypolimnion (deepest, coldest) layer that is isolated from the oxygen source. This piece is a representation of the dissolved oxygen profile from June – November 2017 in the South Basin of Upper Saranac Lake.

I improvised this by using the free online resource Stitch Fiddle www.stitchfiddle.com to convert the bottom right image in Figure 5 to a stitch pattern. It was then knitted and felted by hand. Data are from Laxson et al. 2018, State of the Lake Report, Upper Saranac Lake https://www.adkwatershed.org/sites/default/files/upper_sa...