MULTISPECIES BUILDING ENVELOPES Adopting plant habitat suitability modelling for ecological design decision-making

Urbanisation catalyses habitat loss, impacting humans and biodiversity. To mitigate this, the ECOLOPES research project proposes multispecies building envelopes that enhance ecosystem services provision through cohabitation. Initial envelope designs are optimized and evaluated with a hybrid multi-criteria decision-making model informed by key performance indicators for human and non-human objectives. This paper proposes an architectural approach to derive indicator proxies for the plant stakeholders by adopting aspects of habitat suitability modelling by correlating environmental conditions with species functional traits. Using the hybrid decision-making model, we utilise these proxies to optimise multispecies objectives for a residential building envelope and evaluate the resulting alternative. This alternative is compared with one optimised using indicators inferred from general ecological correlations. Results show the effectiveness of applying the proposed habitat suitability approach in accounting for variations in plant trait values and improving multi- objective trade-offs for multispecies envelope design decision-making.