The risks and rewards of using artificial habitat structures for wildlife conservation

Many of the world's natural environments are irreparably modified and damaged, and consequently, many species have lost critical habitat components they need to survive (Fischer & Lindenmayer, 2007). Increasingly, conservationists and developers seek to supplement these destroyed habitat components with artificial habitat structures—i.e., purposefully designed human-made substitutes for critical features of natural habitats that animals use to bask (Moore, 2019), reproduce (Knaepkens et al., 2004), hibernate (Latham & Knowles, 2008), and take refuge from predators (Bourke et al., 2017) and environmental stressors (Griffiths et al., 2018). They are now used globally in marine, freshwater, and terrestrial environments for a diversity of taxa, including invertebrates (Green, 2005), reptiles (Souter et al., 2004), terrestrial and aquatic mammals (Harley, 2006; Kunnasranta et al., 2022), birds (Hart et al., 2016), amphibians (Latham & Knowles, 2008), and fish (Simpson et al., 2020).