We expected 2024 to be an intense year for us in terms of research. And we were right.
For the fourth time in a year, we are starting a new research project.
Called OptiBioNum, it has been selected by the FEREC Corporate Foundation as part of its annual call for projects.
It aims to provide tools to guide building and infrastructure designers in optimizing the ability of their structures to host biodiversity.
One of the challenges for stakeholders in urban planning, land development, and construction is to be able to compare the ecological "quality" of their various projects or different variants of their construction projects, starting from the early design phases.
The existing labels today do not fully address this need: they struggle to effectively assess ecological continuities (which must be analyzed at the scale of large territories) and, as a result, they also struggle to evaluate the impact that each development project may have on these ecological continuities.
With OptiBioNum, we will focus on two main areas.
The first part will focus on creating standardized indicators to assess the ecological quality of building and infrastructure projects.
To ensure these indicators take into account the impact of projects on the functioning of ecological networks at a large scale, we will rely on numerical simulation.
With a tool such as SimOïko, our species life simulation software, we can diagnose ecological continuities before a project begins, then simulate what would happen in different development scenarios and deduce the impact of each scenario.
Since 2022, we have started exploratory work to develop these types of indicators at the scale of entire territories. The OptiBioNum project will refine and adjust them so they can be used at the scale of a building or transport infrastructure.
The second part will focus on integrating these indicators into the digital tools used by land development and construction professionals.
To achieve this, we will rely on an open-source platform we are currently developing. It already allows the combination of GIS (necessary for modeling and mapping ecological networks at a large scale) and BIM (for 3D modeling of buildings at a fine scale) within a single working environment.
Stay tuned in 2025!