The Living Library of Trees: Mapping Knowledge Ecology in the Arnold Arboretum

As biodiversity loss and climate change accelerate, botanical gardens serve as vital infrastructures for research, education, and conservation. This project focuses on the Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University, a 281-acre living museum founded in 1872 in Boston. Drawing on more than a century of curatorial data, the research combines historical analysis with computational methods to visualize the biographies of plants and people. The resulting platform reveals patterns of care and scientific observations, along with the collective dimensions embedded in botanical data. Using techniques from artificial intelligence, geospatial mapping, and information design, the project frames the arboretum as a system of shared agency--an active archive of more-than-human affinities that records the layered memory of curatorial labor, the situated nature of knowledge production, and the potential of design to bridge archival record and future care.