---
id: questions/sensory-landscape
about:
  label: Sensory landscape
  description: >-
    How do sound, light, smell and barriers shape a place for people and for the
    other animals that live there?
question: {}
domains:
  - sensory
provenance:
  origin: agent
  reviewed: '2026-10-18'
  reviewed_by: >-
    Claude, written for the patrons in devlog/20261018-patrons.md from entries
    on this site; not yet read by Anselm
  status: draft
---
A road, a runway, a lit car park or a fence changes a place for everyone who can hear, see or smell it, and for the animals who navigate by those things. Someone wants to know what a change would do, or why a place already feels wrong.

## What you are really asking

- **Where does the noise, the light or the smell reach**, and how loud, bright or strong is it there?
- **Who notices**: people trying to sleep, birds timing their song, frogs calling, insects navigating by the sky?
- **What would a barrier, a dimmer, a reroute or a quiet hour change?**

## What kind of model answers it

Noise and light propagate in ways that are well understood, and **propagation models** map them from sources across terrain and buildings. The harder half is the effect: what a given level does to a species or a neighbourhood, which comes from field studies rather than physics. Agent-based models of animal movement are used to ask what a barrier or a corridor does to where animals can go.

On this site: [CadnaA](/engines/cadnaa/) for noise, [Radiance](/engines/radiance/) for light, [GRAL](/engines/gral/) for odour and pollutant dispersion, [Circuitscape](/engines/circuitscape/) for habitat connectivity and barriers, and [Walk Score](/engines/walk-score/) for how a place reads on foot. Each entry says what is open and what is not. [A frog chorus](/stories/a-frog-chorus/) is a short story of what one such study found, and [Blue Corridors](/data-sources/blue-corridors-bluecorridors-org/) is a map of whale migration routes with the threats laid alongside, the ocean version of the same question.

## What you need

- The sources: where the road, the runway, the lights are, and their schedule.
- Terrain and buildings.
- Who and what is there: residents, and species records such as [iNaturalist](/data-sources/inaturalist/) observations.
- Measurements: a sound meter on a few nights is cheap and is the check on any model.

## Without a model

Go at night. Listen and look. Ask residents when it is worst. A map of what you heard, hour by hour, is the thing a model would produce.

## Next

[Name the question](/guides/name-the-question/).