question · draft
Sensory landscape
How do sound, light, smell and barriers shape a place for people and for the other animals that live there?
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 for noise, Radiance for light, GRAL for odour and pollutant dispersion, Circuitscape for habitat connectivity and barriers, and Walk Score for how a place reads on foot. Each entry says what is open and what is not. A frog chorus is a short story of what one such study found, and Blue Corridors 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 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
answered with
-
Commercial software from DataKustik GmbH in Germany that calculates, maps and assesses environmental noise from roads, railways, industry and aircraft, from a single site to a whole city.
closed source
-
Open-source program that borrows algorithms from electronic circuit theory to predict how animals, plants and genes move across a landscape, treating every possible path at once; written in Julia.
open sourceopen participation
The Graz Lagrangian Model from Graz University of Technology; simulates the dispersion of pollutants and odour in built-up areas and complex terrain, including low-wind conditions and road tunnel portals.
-
Open-source lighting simulation from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory; uses ray tracing to predict light levels and the appearance of a space before it is built, for daylight and electric light.
open sourcepartly open participation
A hosted service that rates the walkability of any address from 0 to 100 from the walking distance to nearby amenities and from street measures; its companions Transit Score and Bike Score rate public transport and cycling. Scores are served through a widget and an API.
closed sourceclosed dataAPIpartly open participation