Plants and Deep time
How the story came to be…
Initial References
It all started with research. Some of our initial references were:
Effects of climate change on plant biodiversity
The Value Of Pollinators To The Ecosystem And Our Economy
Carboniferous rainforest collapse
The Weird Effect Climate Change Will Have On Plant Growth
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_plant_evolution
Quick Summary
From the references above we created a quick summary of the mayor effects climate change has on vegetation and vice-versa.
What are the visible changes of Climate Change (higher temp) on vegetation?
- Some types of plants are growing quicker, the increase in temperature causes rapid photosynthesis in some plants. This could be problematic because some species would then outcompete others.
- Changes in altitude of vegetation.
- Changes in lifecycles (early bloom)
Over time interglacial periods, which are warmer periods in the earth's history resulted in forestation of large parts of the earth. Whereas glacial periods, when the earth was colder, resulted in smaller vegetation and lots of grasslands. However, it is unknown what the impact of our current global warming on vegetation will be. There are major uncertainties in predicting what the effect is of one species disappearing on the rest of the ecosystem.
Visualizing deep time
Now we were faced with the challenge of visualizing deep time. We searched the web for different ways to visualize deep time. Matt Prindible recommended to look at the Deep Time Walk, this app narrates the history of the earth over a 5K walk. This was a very interesting experience because it used more sensors than just visual & audio.
Video script VS complete Script
After diving deep into the research we realized there are so many interesting stories to tell about plants and deep time! However, if we were to include all the interesting research we found our video would have been 10+ minutes, which is not interesting nor feasible. Therefore we had to do what every researcher hates but every designer knows is inevitable: cut content! We managed to bring down the script drastically to only include the most relevant bits to be able to tell our story.
The video script can be found on our google drive:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1CBH1RRTmAjKDt8Qg6LAWtdn5RP7Ra0wRB0gPbcjk68s/edit
