Interview with Sara Ryding led by Clare Vernon (Faculty of Science, Engineering and Built Environment, Deakin University)

Tell us about your work…

“I am a PhD student at Deakin CIE, from Sweden! My PhD is focusing on how birds are adapting morphologically to climate change. I use a 3D surface

scanner [to scan] 5000 museum specimens across NSW, SA, ACT and Victoria.”

… and the science behind it?

“Birds can use their bills and thermal regulation. The important metric in that is the surface area of the bill: the larger the surface area, [the] more space to passively lose heat from. If your surface area is larger theoretically, you can lose more heat through it.

This trend in the size of bills and response to temperature is quite apparent on a spatial scale; birds in the really hot tropics have bigger bills relative to their body size, [compared to] birds in the cooler parts of the country.”

What’s your PhD project about? 

“We’re investigating [whether] there is an extension of that through [historical] time. Are bills are becoming larger in response to climate change and increased temperatures?

A 3D surface scanner in this context lets us measure surface area directly. [Current manual] methods will use bill length, bill width, and build depth, and then assume that bills are cone shaped to calculate surface area of a cone.

If you think about it a bird like sparrow, their bill is sort of basically cone shaped. But if you look at a shearwater for example, or a bird of prey (like an eagle), they have like a very hooked beak – it’s not cone shaped.”

House sparrow. Image credits: Wikipedia, 2022

Shearwater. Image credits: Wikipedia, 2007

“We’re using our 3D surface scanner to see how well the manual methods do for different species and what we can do to improve manual estimates for people who don’t have access to 3D surface scanners.

Another huge benefit is that museum collections are super valuable repositories of ecological, biological and natural history knowledge. By 3D surface scanning of the specimen, we digitise them in a way that they are preserved for future generations, and the data can be accessed without requiring like handling of a specimen. For example, if a researcher in South America [wants to access a sample], they can look at these three surface scans and get measurements without having to overcome this financial barrier of travelling to Australia and getting access to the museums. Alternatively, colleagues can’t take a 3D surface scanner out with them and capture a bird and then just hold it still while they’re scanning it. But, it is feasible for them to take a live bird, collect those manual measurements of that bird, and let it go – we can sort of correct for the manual field based estimates that field ecologists are making.”

Check out some of Sara’s 3D scans below:

• Starling: https://viewshape.com/shapes/32bd9e39f66c
• Forest kingfisher: https://viewshape.com/shapes/6b71effef44c
• Little penguin: https://viewshape.com/shapes/2e836f44edfc
• Red goshawk egg: https://viewshape.com/shapes/1be86fd9fb0f