Modelling and Design of Habitat Features: Will Manufactured Poles Replace Living Trees as Perch Sites for Birds?

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.