Skyscaping expands upon the dynamic ecosystem of the Chesapeake Bay, highlighting its multifaceted influence shaped by environmental, ecological, and sociocultural factors. By emphasizing the Bay’s crucial role in sustaining diverse migratory species, the project aims to challenge traditional conservation methods by actively engaging with landscape systems and evolution. With a particular focus on the Irish Grove Wildlife Sanctuary, Skyscaping explores a landscape laboratory methodology aimed at deepening our understanding of bird migration and ecosystem dynamics at the scale of the Chesapeake Bay, the Atlantic Flyway, and, ultimately, the globe.
By shifting the Irish Grove Wildlife Sanctuary into a public “land lab,” stakeholders can experiment with landscape prototypes and observe avian behavior to explore ecological evolution possibilities and plan for post-anthropogenic landscapes. The project seeks to expand bird stopovers and improve monitoring practices through unconventional design techniques and experimental interventions, fostering a dynamic and interactive ecological surveillance and management approach.
Under the stewardship of organizations like the Maryland Ornithological Society (MOS), Cornell Lab, and the Audubon Society, Irish Grove exemplifies passive conservation efforts that fail to address the complex interactions between non-human agents and their environments. Our project proposes an engaged management approach through experimental alterations in place-based land labs to better accommodate social, political, and ecological changes.
Current research on avian migratory behavior is rooted in studying habitat gradients and layers. Our methodology analyzes benthic, ground, structural, and atmospheric layers along a gradient from organic to artificial. This approach helps us expand our understanding of how birds respond and adapt to increasingly anthropogenic environments. We ask, “How will interactions between birds and artificial mediums change in a post-anthropogenic world?” Along Irish Grove’s gradient, elements range from naturally occurring submerged aquatic vegetation and ghost forests to artificial insect hotels and construction debris. By distilling habitat features into elements, stakeholders can begin understanding and expanding the nuances behind avian behavior and how they aid the evolution of our climates and ecologies.
Once established, elements combine to create units geared toward specific species, ecological functions, intrinsic values, and potential for knowledge production. Units are then hybridized and adapted to the landscape to test and engage with existing habitat gradients. The Bay’s current surveillance techniques passively produce excessive amounts of data. Our land lab(s) propose a new active approach to monitoring and fostering generational knowledge through continued place-based interaction and evolving engagement. Public and private stakeholders from local, regional, and territorial levels can participate in recreational, educational, and scientific activities.
Skyscaping encompasses the multidimensional and multi-scalar environments humans and non-humans occupy and change. By prioritizing birds as agents of ecological evolution, we argue for a new, active form of landscape engagement through experimentation and adaptation, creating a feedback loop of understanding, testing, observing, informing, and implementing. The Irish Grove Skyscaping Land Lab serves as a precedent for improving our knowledge of symbiotic relationships between migratory birds and our increasingly migratory climates at the scale of communities, regions, and, ultimately, global territories.
Student Names: Samantha Hubbard, Maya Neal, Paige Werman.
University: University of Virginia.
Supervisors: Bradley Cantrell, Sean Kois