Nature painters, you can help scientists!

Artists, when you paint nature try to paint the colours, shapes (like river banks and mountain ridges) exactly like you see. This will give clues to future generations to come to conclusions based on your works regarding the conditions in which you worked. This will have tremendous ecological impacts.
In the future, in case the river changes the course or a landslide occurs, people should be able to identify the differences with the help of your art works.
No I am not joking.
Read this article: Hidden in old paintings, a clue to past climate

http://www.dailyclimate.org/tdc-newsroom/2014/03/painting-climate-h...

It says:

Deep red sunsets offer more than just a stunning backdrop for Old Masters' paintings: They can tell how dirty the air was when the painter picked up the brush.

The degree of red in the skies depicted in historic paintings offers a proxy for pollution levels in the Earth's past atmosphere, according to a study published Tuesday. What's more, artists' sunsets have gradually gotten redder over the past 150 years, likely reflecting increased man-made pollution.

Although photos too can capture the reality, camera cannot 'paint' the colours as well as an artist can.There is a difference between the eye of a human being and the 'eye' of the camera. Human eye works better in capturing colours than technology can.

And artists don't use reference photos to paint pictures if you want to help climate science because you don't capture the exact colours of nature when you do. That is why the old painting can help - not the present ones done by using reference photos taken with digital cameras! Plein-air is the best way to go!

Yes, artists today are sensitive to the environment. They can help more now! Real value Science-art collaborations!

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Another example: How a Volcanic Eruption in 1815 Darkened the World but Colored the Arts

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/25/science/mount-tambora-volcano-eru...

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And here is another example given by a professor which is a bit controversial:

How did (or didn't) paintings help biologists?

A still life painting, an oil on canvas of fruits on a table by Renaissance painter Giovanni Stanchi, serves a useful purpose to scientists, according to one professor. It is a biology lesson of sorts, as it depicts a nearly unrecognizable watermelon in the foreground, reports This is Colossal. Vox reports horticulture professor James Nienhuis at the university of Wisconsin as explaining how analyzing classical paintings of fruits and vegetables are one of the few ways of documenting what they looked like, before selective breeding (to get meatier flesh and other characters) changed the way they look. The greens we eat today are bred for human convenience.

It's fun to go to art museums and see the still-life pictures, and see what our vegetables looked like 500 years ago, according to this professor. In many cases, it's our only chance to peer into the past, since we can't preserve vegetables for hundreds of years. This shows over the years we've bred watermelons to have the bright red color we recognize today. That fleshy interior is actually the watermelon's placenta, which holds the seeds. Before it was fully domesticated, that placenta lacked the high amounts of lycopene that give it the red color. Through hundreds of years of domestication, we've modified smaller watermelons with a white interior into the larger, lycopene-loaded versions we know today. But such ones were present in 1600s too! ( http://imgur.com/a/zN8Kv   http://strangesounds.org/2014/05/hollow-hearts-or-when-starring-wat...  

But look at the picture below taken recently...

 According to some biologists, this picture shows that professor James Nienhuisis's argument  is a very lop-sided one because... they say this picture painted by the old master could just be an unripe or under-watered watermelon. Or it is one with hollow heart, which can look similar. Watermelon “starring" happens because of a lack of viable pollen. If, during fruit set you have cold cloudy weather, no bees working or any adverse environmental conditions, the developed fruit can display starring. This can happen now also. Hmmm.

You can have more comparisons and proof for the second argument here: http://imgur.com/a/zN8Kv

and here

http://phys.org/news/2015-06-potential-hollow-heart-disorder-waterm...

The pictures given below are the ones that support the first inference ...

Giovanni Stanchi (Rome c. 1645-1672). Oil on canvas. 38 5/8 x 52½ in. (98 x 133.5 cm.) / Credit: Christie’s

The ones below show the difference very clearly.  Stanchi's watermelon, which was painted sometime between 1645 and 1672, offers a glimpse of a time before breeding changed the fruit ( not a correct argument) according to professor James Nienhuis.

Well, I think the second argument and understanding is correct. Professor James Nienhuis is science-art-field-biased or ignorant about the watermelons' real nature. We have the proof before our eyes!