Virtual Forestry

• General-purpose software such as 3D Nature's WCS / VNS, or ESRI 3D Analyst is commonly used for forest visualization.  However, there have been a number of forestry-specific applications and projects over the years.

• U.S. Forest Service, Pacific Northwest Research Station
  • USDA EnVision - Environmental Visualization System
    • non-realtime rendering system for stand- and landscape-scale images
    • public domain, Win32 only, currently not very stable
    • imports USGS DEMs, geospecific images, and extremely detailed forest stand information from ESRI Shapefile polygons
    • the following parameters are required:
      • Stand identifier, Species identifier, Diameter at breast height, Total tree height, Live crown ratio, Trees per hectare
    • can easily draw millions of trees
  • USDA Stand Visualization System (SVS)
    • an older software tool for rendering symbolic representations of a patch of forest
    • public domain, Windows only
• Lehrstuhl für Waldwachstumskunde
  • "Chair Of Forest Yield Science: System Knowledge for Forests and Mankind"
  • a project at the Technical University of Munich, which models forest growth, with input from actual measurements of forest plots
  • includes software components TreeView and l-Vis for 3D visualization
  • uses OpenGL, trees are displayed as real 3D objects or billboards depending on distance
  • technical paper, "Three-dimensional visualization of forest growth" (in German), has link to Win32 demo (2 MB) under "Anhang"
• Forester
  • a scene composition tool for forestry, $35 for Windows
  • outputs POV-Ray format, for rendering with that package
  • features listed: Full scene animation, Object/camera flight paths, Motion Blur, Procedural grass simulation, 3D cloud simulation, Water layer
  • elevation import is by means of TerraGen format, so georeferencing is lost; perhaps this tool belongs on the Artificial / Artistic page
  • includes a tree-modeling companion software, Forester Arboretum, which is listed on Plant Software
• SmartForest II (1998, historical reference)
  • a "spatially defensible, object-oriented, visualization system" from the imaging systems laboratory, dept of landscape architecture, University of Illinois; later apparently hosted at Imaging Systems Laboratory, Dept. of Landscape Architecture at Penn State University
  • Historical; most references on the site say 1997; runs on IBM AIX (RS/6000) platforms, with just an experimental demo version for Windows
• The Virtual Forest (1998, historical reference)
  • "Advanced 3-D Visualization Techniques for Forest Management and Research"
  • A set of SGI software developed in cooperation between Pacific Meridian and Basis in the mid-1990s, primary developer was Craig Ulbricht.
  • A migration to Windows was considered but did not occur.  Was used for several years in support of service contracts to various research and private sector organizations.
  • Closely related to ESRI software, but did not require Arc/Info
  • Included a GUI "Tree Impressionist" for designing trees
  • Explicit visualization actions including definition of:
    • a DTM view
    • sun and light source conditions, atmospheric conditions, sky conditions
    • vector polygon boundaries
    • DTM surface texturing, tree stand boundaries
    • planting (tree rendering), and harvesting (tree removal)
• The old article Visualize Realistic Landscapes: 3-D Modeling Helps GIS Users Envision Natural Resources (GeoWorld magazine, 1998) is still cited frequently as the turning point for the full integration of GIS databases and virtual reality with a particular emphasis on forestry.