I have been working on the NSF project “Visualizing Forest Futures Under Climate Uncertainty” (#1617396). This work was recently published in International Journal of Geographical Information Science (IJGIS). Read about it here. The paper is ranked top 10 in its media impact across all papers published by Taylor & Francis’s 2500 journals. It is featured in different media outlets including Fast company, Yahoo,  AAAS EurekAlert, and PSU News (over 300 likes and collects),

I am responsible for the 3D and VR parts of this project. My contribution was translating the abstract projected biomass data obtained from ecological model in different climate scenarios to tangible forest models in VR. I used CGA grammar to code how the trees look (height, DBH, crown size, density……), and rendered in Unreal. The original goal was to communicate how the climate change impacted forest. As the project developed, I found that there was a lack of communication between data, especially geospatial data and the widely-used game engines such as Unity/UE4. Therefore, the current focus for me is to create a tool to visualize GIS/geospatial data in game engines in real-time.

Below is a rendered video of the forest and a live demo that I created. As you can see, inside VR users can explore the forest, select different climate scenarios and management strategies and view the corresponding forest projection, query data, etc.

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Forest under the normal condition and a wind disturbance

Understories

Additional screenshots of the forest