Living Observatory Community Platform
Living Observatory: our beginnings
Living Observatory was founded in 2011 as a non-profit Learning Collaborative. At the time, Evan and I were working to protect and "restore" Tidmarsh Farms, our cranberry farm in Manomet, Plymouth, Massachusetts. The first wetland restoration of a cranberry farm, Eel River, had just been completed, but there was very little information about how to restore, how the ecology would change given proposed actions, how the hydrology and soils would recover wetland function.
Insight: The only way to learn how to best restore cranberry farmland is to make an intervention aimed at restoring wetland function, monitor key indicators over many years, share the stories of what worked and what didn't with the restoration community and the public, begin again.
Inspiration
My background as a founding member of the MIT Media Lab and as a documentary filmmaker suggested that we would benefit by having an organization that was dedicated to measuring outcomes and documenting the arc of change. At its beginning, the MIT Media Lab was a community of 28 or so faculty, each with their own specialty; students from different groups work along side each other, share expertise, learn from each other.
Sensors can be an important tool for monitoring. To jump-start Living Observatory, I met with Joe Paradiso who runs the Responsive Environments Group at the Media Lab. His student, Gershon Dublon, who had been working on Doppellab, joined the meeting. Doppellab was a 3D rendering of the lab building that used available sensor data, the building demonstrated activity - abstract shapes and colors indicated areas that were cold or hot; other shapes represented movement of people, individual or en mass etc.
I asked Joe whether he would be interested in moving beyond the building context to a large outdoor space.
In the spirit of a learning collaborative, we needed to find people who studied wetland development. Alex Hackman, a restoration specialist at the Division of Ecological Restoration, understood that a diverse group of people who wanted to study these restorations would be helpful. Together we pitched the idea to a few faculty at U of Mass Amherst. David Boutt, a Professor who studies groundwater and the sub-surface processes that impact it along its journey, liked the idea. He had a student in mind. And so we began...
Living Observatory provides a place where landowners and researchers can tell their stories, where data from restoration projects can be shared, and where teams working on larger projects can document insights and progress their learning priorities.
The LO infrastructure helps the community develop a shared understanding about best practice for achieving the wetland restoration of cranberry farmland.