RIVER TREES

What if we started looking at our planet's rivers and streams as trees?

Think about it for a second: rivers and their watersheds —which are vast networks of tributaries converging to form bigger rivers—form, like trees, complex and harmonious branches, hierarchical structures carrying a vital flow of sap or water, experiencing highs and lows throughout the seasons.

Let's take the metaphor: like trees, rivers can fall ill: parasites, fungi, or pollution. They can also bear fruit on their branches: cities. Their lakes and ponds are like outgrowths on the surface of the bark. Like trees, rivers connect environments and enable them to interact: the aerial, forest, and underground environments are mirrored in the brackish waters of the estuary, the plains and valleys, and the mountains that the river flows through. Temperature, precipitation, and gravity are the three major factors that determine the shape and development of both trees and rivers.

Welcome to this map series resembling botanical portraits, maps of some of our planet's major rivers, all oriented in such a way as to suggest the silhouette of a plant organism. Through these maps, each river takes on a new, organic, shrub-like appearance, resembling trees of various species and profiles that have grown in environments that are sometimes windy, sometimes humid, sometimes arid. Some do not reach the sea: they have no roots, while others have very thin, slender roots, and still others are stocky and twisted... Put in this form, these river-trees touch the mountains and ice caps from their crowns, while their estuaries, their invisible roots, plunge deep into the seas and oceans of the globe.