By Teal Gardner, Morgan Kulas, Justin Moore, Rebecca Schultz, Natalie Stopka, Becca Zablocki, Alejandra Ortiz de Zavallos, Sarah Rutherford – Nomad Interdisciplinary MFA Students at the University of Hartford & Ensayos.

Students in the Nomad Interdisciplinary Art & Regenerative Culture MFA took an Art & Ecology course with Christy Gast and Camila Marambio, who teach collaboratively as part of Ensayos, in June, 2021. The course focused on peatland conservation. Students participated in the Binational Seminar on the Peatlands of Patagonia and learned about peatland ecology through a field trip to the Crystal Peat Conservation Area in Tolland, CT. For their final project, students collaboratively responded to a prompt from the Patagonia Peatland Initiative to experiment with the ArcGIS StoryMap platform to create an interactive tool that creatively integrates art and science to tell the story of a (former) peatland. The students will present their StoryMap, which delves into the complex past, present and future of the Crystal Peat Conservation Area, followed by a Q & A.