When working with location based applications, one notion that seems to be not so easy to author in is stationary location with changing time. Transition from one location co-ordinate to another, the trace, does contain a time shift and can easily be represented. While an interview audio file can create a time dimension to a locality it is embedded in via narrative, layers of data going back for several years are difficult to represent on a map interface. How to represent data vertically on a map? During this project, we are sonifying data files to give a sense of changing values. Daniel Woo has developed a representation with bubbles that react to changing values over time, matching the animated bubble movement, intensity and partially colour of water.
On interview samples part of the Ecolocated installation, Adam Mellor from Agri-Food and Biosciences Institute speaks of their data collection from marine sensors in the Belfast Lough. They have regular data from the Lough from over 8 years of time with in-situ instruments, and more than that with water sample based readings. “We are only now beginning to find out how useful the data is” he says. In terms of the marine ecosystem, water quality readings need to be matched with changes in organisms in the water column.
We got kind permission to use a year and a half of data from Buoy number 8 in the Victorian Channel, in the Belfast lough, before the entry to the harbour. This data we sonified, but would need quite a bit more time to model it adequately to represent time-value changes.
Adam also talked about the excessive rain fall from the last two, and this summer. “Two summers ago it was a once in 80 years type of phenomenon. Now we have a third very wet summer in a row”. The rain fall creates a strong wash from rivers and land to the littoral zones, increasing the nutrient and organic particle levels in the Lough radically. Measurements would point out, according to Mellor, that sewage overspill is not a main factor in the impact on the water column, even though it contributes to the long term stress on the Lough’s ecosystem.
Northern Ireland Environmental Agency is deploying aeration devices to some areas where there occurs anoxia, depletion of oxygen. Several public organisations are doing reactive measures to counterbalance environmental impacts of the rainfall, which is likely to be caused by the wider climate change. Sometimes reactive measures are done on different grounds than the benefit to human ecosystems. For example, the Belfast river Lagan Weir has imrpoved the river aesthetically (visually and smell wise) but also created a rather impounded river area above the weir, from which agricultural nutrients do not flush to the sea, but saturate in the river.
