Our thesis project consists of three architectural interventions: The Mushroom, The Gnat and The Snake, fitting into a vision of a Swedish forest managed in a more sustainable way. A future in which the practice of clear-felling has been abandoned in favor of alternative methods falling under the umbrella term Continuous Cover Forestry (CCF). As the biological aspects of forestry is not our area of expertise, we have investigated what this reorganization at large would mean for the Swedish landscape, economy and society. Where it becomes a question for architecture. When the timber industry looses its hegemony over the forest, the forest becomes available to different uses. For life and recreation, and for the production of forest goods other than timber, such as wild game meat, berries, and mushrooms. These activities are able to take place within the same space as forestry, thereby overcoming the spatial separation of functions we see today. Our interventions work by docking onto different points of today’s logistics flow, in order to later replace them. They take into account more of the different values and users of the forest which we have identified. The project follows the flow of goods from the forest as they make their way towards the larger markets. The Mushroom is an outpost in the middle of the productive forest which supplies the surrounding area with the necessary infrastructure in order to extract goods from it, doubling as a recreational dwelling. One of these can be placed every 30 km. The Gnat is a tower structure containing multiple different functions ranging from marking the pick-up spot for the harvested timber, functioning as a hunting tower, shelter and storage. Many of them are placed along forest roads. The Snake is a local processing plant managing small-scale refinement of the goods of the forest close to their site of harvest, thus channeling some of the economical flow back to the communities living of the forest. Together they form a complete series of infrastructure demonstrating how we could organize the future Swedish forest.

Animal behaviours are demonstrably governed by sensory stimulation, previous experience and internal states like hunger. With increasing hunger, priorities shift towards foraging and feeding. During foraging, flies are known to employ efficient path integration strategies. However, general long-term activity patterns for both hungry and satiated flies in conditions of foraging remain to be better understood. Similarly, little is known about how permanent contact chemosensory stimulation affects locomotion. To address these questions, we have developed a novel, simplistic fly activity tracking setup— the Panopticon. Using a 3D-printed Petri dish inset, our assay allows recording of walking behaviour, of several flies in parallel, with all arena surfaces covered by a uniform substrate layer. We tested two constellations of providing food: (i) in single patches and (ii) omnipresent within the substrate layer. Fly tracking is done with FIJI, further assessment, analysis and presentation is done with a custom-built MATLAB analysis framework. We find that starvation history leads to a long-lasting reduction in locomotion, as well as a delayed place preference for food patches which seems to be not driven by immediate hunger motivation.

Exotic invasive plant species can alter aquatic habitats potentially influencing the macroinvertebrate community and foraging fishes. Therefore, I investigated the hypothesis that Hydrilla verticillata will alter habitat important to macroinvertebrate community structure and bluegill foraging efficiency. Studies were conducted in ponds and aquaria. At the pond level, macroinvertebrate abundance, richness, and biomass in a hydrilla-dominated habitat did not differ significantly from a diverse plant habitat. Indicator taxa did differ significantly between respective treatments. The data suggest hydrilla beds may not provide increased macroinvertebrate abundance and richness compared to diverse plant beds as previously thought. In aquaria, habitat complexity (Ihv) and light transmittance were influenced by increasing the homogeneity of hydrilla in an aquatic bed habitat. In addition, bluegill foraging efficiency was affected negatively by increasing spatial complexity of a hydrilla dominated habitat. Therefore, a shift to a monotypic hydrilla habitat can alter macroinvertebrate community composition and impact bluegill foraging success.

The goal of this thesis is to identify differences and consistencies in the trajectories taken by foraging agents before and after they have learned the location of a target. The challenge is that these agents do not go directly towards the target after learning and keep a certain amount of randomness in their paths. We use different versions of discrete curvature and head angle as tools in this analysis. We also build models of foraging agents using stochastic processes with data supported parameters.

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