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It is well known that hierarchical structure is an important feature in biological materials to optimise various properties, including mechanical ones. It is however still unclear how these hierarchical architectures can improve material characteristics, for example strength. Also, the transposition of these structures from natural to artificial bioinspired materials remains to be perfected. In this paper, we introduce a numerical method to evaluate the strength of fibre-based heterogeneous biological materials and systematically investigate the role of hierarchy. Results show that hierarchy indeed plays an important role and that it is possible to "tune" the strength of bio-inspired materials in a wide range of values, in some cases improving the strength of non-hierarchical structures considerably., (Copyright © 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)