Every painting began with a view

The mission

1. 01 · Project Background

   Can we reliably use paintings to help address our shifted baselines and better understand environmental change?

   Art Ecology began as an effort to understand how landscapes have changed. Paintings from the 19th and early 20th centuries show forests, prairies, wetlands and mountains as they looked one and two centuries ago.

   Every generation tends to treat the landscape it grew up with as normal, even as that landscape declines. Ecologists call this a shifting baseline (Pauly 1995). Tree rings, sediment cores and old written records can measure what has changed. A painting set beside a photograph of the same place today lets anyone see it.

   The project has three aims:

   1. A place where people can explore art and the outdoors together, and have fun doing it.
   2. A set of images showing how landscapes across the country have changed over the last 100 to 200 years, which historical ecologists can use to measure how conditions have shifted.
   3. A record that helps art historians see where painters worked, and how closely they engaged with the land in front of them.
   Using Paintings as Data ↓

2. 02 · Using Paintings as Data

   How far can we trust what a painter put on the canvas?

   It depends. Ecologists have mostly left landscape paintings alone because of artistic license. Recent work by ecologists and art historians found that, with focused questions and an understanding of the artist’s context and intentions, a painting can be a reliable record of a place (Warren et al. 2023; Davis et al. 2025).

   For certain artists, at certain times and in certain media, we can make an educated guess that a work was painted on site and is likely to be accurate. For many others, we don’t know yet.

   That is where you come in. Find where a painting was made and photograph the same view, and the pair can show whether the artist moved a mountain or left it where it stood. Our published work suggests the paintings are largely accurate, but science corrects itself, and testing that idea takes many more paintings found and photographed.

   How discovery works ↓

3. 03 · How discovery works

   How can an unknown location be turned into an effective data point?

   Every painting in the collection begins without a confirmed location. The community narrows down the site together through clues, each one a proposed place marked as a point or an area on the map. A clue can draw on details in the painting itself, on what its records tell us, or on someone’s own knowledge of the land.

   Clues are public as soon as they are added, and each one is drawn onto a shared map of potential location confidence. Where several point to the same ground, the map glows hottest and the search area shrinks. A mistaken clue is weighed against the others rather than erasing them, and anyone can agree with a clue or comment on it.

   A painting is discovered once a photograph of its site has been reviewed and approved. The reviewer records how strongly the evidence supports that location, from low to confirmed, and a site is confirmed only when the evidence settles it.

   How to take part ↓

4. 04 · How to take part

   What can you add to the search?

   If you hike and love a treasure hunt, there is a place for you here. If you only ever walk through museums, there is a role for you too. And if you would rather study paintings and photographs from your chair at home, there is plenty to do from there.

   There are three ways to contribute. Add a clue from any painting’s page, drawing on what you see in it or what you know of the land. Send a present-day photograph taken from where you believe the painter stood. Or propose a historic painting the collection does not hold yet.

   Contributing needs an account with a verified email address. A clue appears on the map the moment you add it. Photographs and proposed paintings are reviewed before they are published. Every contribution carries your name.

   Each approved photograph is paired with its painting and shown side by side on the Compare page. Together the pairs become the project’s research record, for ecologists measuring how conditions have shifted and for art historians asking where and how painters worked.