Eleanor Lutz is a matchmaker, but not for people. Instead she pairs knotty scientific topics with sublime visuals and publishes them on her blog, *Tabletop Whale. *And these aren’t random setups: She once illustrated the topography of Mars as a Victorian-era explorer’s map, connecting two periods of voyaging and discovery. Ikea assembly guides inspired an infographic on embryonic development. Recently she hitched diagrams of viruses to a trading card motif because, like baseball players or Pokémon species, each virus has a unique profile.
Lutz’s latest setup involves a category of plants that need fire to survive. Fire ecology, as it’s known among scientists, acknowledges wildland fires as instrumental to a functioning ecosystem---a point of view likely lost on most. “Most people tend to think about natural events from mostly a human perspective---like how forest fires or flooding affect you---but this other perspective is really interesting too,” Lutz says. To illustrate it, she built low-relief paper sculptures of six different plants and then set a match to them. She cast her aflame creations on another series of trading cards, highlighting the unique properties and behaviors of each.
Almost anything---tweets, observations, her studies---serves as inspirational fodder for Lutz. The idea for animated fire ecology trading cards came from close to home: Lutz’s father studies forest fires and teaches ecology at the University of Utah. His work takes place in Yosemite National Park and the Sierra Nevada mountains in California and focuses on the matter of forest regeneration and adaptation as it relates to fires. “I hear about it all the time, when I go home for the holidays,” Lutz says.
With her father consulting on the project, Lutz settled on giant sequoia, fireweed, California black oak, ponderosa pine, California lilac, and knobcone pine as the six plants that would represent the six ways fire assists nature’s growth. Each is native to California, where wildfires are rampant, especially in recent drought years. The narrow focus appeals to Lutz. “Fire ecology is a huge topic, but if it’s concentrated around a few examples, it can be easier to understand.” Indeed, that ethos extends throughout most of Lutz’s information graphics. “There’s a knowledge barrier to accessing some of the interesting, awesome things about science. There are so many facts and equations, and I want those cool ideas to be accessible.”
With Lutz’s work, they are. The fire ecology trading cards---animated to full, smoldering effect in the gallery above---plainly explain how, for instance, the giant sequoia’s 6-to-8-inch-thick bark resists burning, and that fire opens up the knobcone pine so it can disperse its seeds. It’s a compact lesson in a niche corner of the botany world specifically and in information design in general. After all, fire ecology and honest-to-God flames? That’s a hot match.
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