Art and science share many commonalities of observing and addressing questions about the world around us, and were once integrated as essential parts of the same process of inquiry. Today, both scientists and artists recognize that art and science can both help both inform or stimulate the other, potentially leading to novel approaches and mediums for documenting and understanding environmental change. We asked artists and scientists to address, using examples from their collaborative work at the intersection of art and science, some aspect of the following prompts:

1) Art that serves as a visual record of environmental change - for example, photographs of the same landscape taken at different dates showing the loss of glaciers;

2) Art inspired by existing data - for example, critical transitions between alternate stable states that are mathematically hard to distinguish but are more evident in art forms such as music;

3) Art that helps environmental change scientists participate better in the creative process - for example, using moss materials to create sculptures during a dry period served to emphasize the indirect impacts of climate change in a temperate rainforest.

The goal of this session is to stimulate discussion about the integration of art and science, specifically within ecology, as a means to create novel research questions or improve our understanding of environmental change through alternative lenses.