In environmental monitoring, a picture is worth a thousand words. Crowd-sourcing hundreds or thousands of field photos for sustained environmental monitoring and reporting is even better!

By engaging community members in taking and sharing photographs of the landscape, the LRWP’s #FRAMES repeat digital photography project serves a need in bringing awareness to areas at risk for sea level rise, littering, and development pressures. We think our monitoring #FRAME – conceived as a sculpture – is a pretty great example of creative environmental communication! Check it out in New Brunswick’s Boyd Park, along the water near the amphitheater.

This project developed as a collaboration between the Lower Raritan Watershed Partership, coLAB Arts, the City of New Brunswick, and sculpture artist Toby Horton. Grant funding has been provided by the Middlesex County Board of County Commissioners through a grant award from the Middlesex County Cultural and arts trust fund. Made possible by funds from Middlesex County, a partner of the New Jersey State Council on the Arts.

Frames: This project includes installation of streamside sculptures and signage that tell a story of hidden streams and landuse impacts in our local floodplains. Some sculptures are crafted of materials salvaged from homes destroyed by flooding and communicate historic flood height in the area. Designed as “frames,” they are positioned to frame views of areas at risk of inundation, erosion and other climate impacts. Interpretive information invites the viewer to take photos through the frame and to upload to social media. This actively engages the viewer/photographer as civic scientist and yields crowd-source longitudinal data that tells a story of seasonal and other changes (litter, invasive plants, high water levels) thus allowing for restoration planning.