Click this button to go directly to the final project. Note: It may take a few minutes to load.

The Project

For the last two summers, I have interned at the Monk Botanical Gardens in Wausau, Wisconsin. In this position, I had the opportunity to explore the 31 acres and truly experience the beauty nature has to offer. My experiences there inspired me to create an interactive narrative that explores the connections critters have with their home and the garden for my senior thesis project.

Broken down by species, this project examines the ecological relationships: mutualism, commensalism, parasitism, predation, and competition. Each page breaks down the relationship with various facts and details that help further explain how the organism survives. The 12 species highlighted can all be found at Monk Botanical Gardens, and most of the time throughout Northern Wisconsin. Some species, like cormorants and spotted owls, are not typically native to Northern Wisconsin.

The Process

I started by compiling a list of the species and doing various sketches for them, along with countless hours of research into what ecological relationship they exhibit. For more insight into the production of this project, visit the link below.

I illustrated the main mural in Adobe Photoshop and the 12 asset pages were done in Adobe Illustrator. After all of the illustrations were complete, I compiled them in Adobe Animate where I coded the buttons and animations. The HTML file was uploaded to a server via namecheap.com, where it can be interacted with. This website was created in Adobe Spark.

The Final