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Published VersionCC BY V4.0, Open Access
Published VersionCC BY V4.0, Open
Journal article
Modelling and Design of Habitat Features: Will Manufactured Poles Replace Living Trees as Perch Sites for Birds?
Sustainability, Vol.15(9), pp.1-30
2023
Abstract
The need to support life in degraded landscapes is a pressing challenge of our time. Models from ecology, computing, architecture, and engineering can support the design and construction of habitat features in contexts where human intervention is necessary and urgent. For example, anthropogenic change is causing many arboreal habitats to disappear due to diminishing populations of large old trees. Current management approaches can provide artificial replacements in the shape of poles for perching and boxes for nesting. However, their large-scale long-term impacts are rarely assessed and often unclear. Along with benefits, these structures can result in ecological traps, waste, and pollution. Although computer-aided design and fabrication can provide more sophisticated solutions, limited understanding of tree structures and their use by arboreal wildlife constrain the formulation of clear goals for engineering. In response, this research examines long-term implications at a restoration site that already features a variety of living and manufactured habitat structures. To do so, we build a computational simulation that uses high-fidelity lidar scans of trees in combination with field observations of bird interactions with branches. This simulation models landscape-scale dynamics of habitat supply over hundreds of years. It can account for many types of structures, including trees, snags, and utility poles, irrespective of the processes that led to their availability. We use this understanding of integrated supply to generate quantitative comparisons of design strategies that can inform design decisions in application to arboreal habitats and other modified ecosystems.
Details
- Title
- Modelling and Design of Habitat Features: Will Manufactured Poles Replace Living Trees as Perch Sites for Birds?
- Authors
- Alexander Holland (Author) - The University of MelbournePhilip Gibbons (Author) - Australian National UniversityJason Thompson (Author) - The University of MelbourneStanislav Roudavski (Corresponding Author) - The University of Melbourne
- Publication details
- Sustainability, Vol.15(9), pp.1-30
- Publisher
- MDPI AG
- Date published
- 2023
- DOI
- 10.3390/su15097588
- ISSN
- 2071-1050
- Copyright note
- © 2023 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/).
- Data Availability
- We provide further information about the workflow steps in the Supplementary Materials. Data and the code for data preparation, the model, and data visualisation are available at https://github.com/alexrfholland/tree-sim (accessed on 1 May 2023).
- Grant note
- Australian Capital Territory Government Grant ‘Intelligent Cultivation of Artificial Trees’
- Organisation Unit
- Centre for Human Factors and Systems Science
- Language
- English
- Record Identifier
- 991184300402621
- Output Type
- Journal article
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