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WebGL virtual globe for efficient forest production planning in mountainous area

Published: 18 June 2015 Publication History

Abstract

This paper illustrates a 3D web-based visual simulation system that supports spatial-information based realistic modelling and real-time rendering of forest scenes. 3D visualization of forest landscapes will be used to understand stand ecological succession, landscape transformation helping regional planning and improving decision-making processes and forest management through what-if analysis tools.
The goal of the presented project is to deploy a web system able to easily provide access to forestry information, typically managed in GIS or dedicated system, ensuring the fruition of this information to non-geospatial experts like forest owners and field operators.Technologies such as HTML5, WebGL, CSS 3D and Canvas element have been chosen as the most suitable for the interactive visualization of the forest model placed in the context of a virtual globe representation of the Earth using a highly customized version of the CesiumJS virtual globe, called GeoBrowser3D. Powered by WebGL and state of the art software technologies it offers a three-dimensional Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) compliant solution, integrated with computational and visual techniques for decision making environments.
This solution allows large scale GIS data visualization such as maps and forest models, as well as high detail small scale information such as point clouds or stems structures that are automatically generated according to inventory database and pre-designed template models. Additionally, forest activity planners can have access to larger scale datasets like roads and cadastral maps as well as single timber information.
The system has been tested and evaluated in applications of walkthrough simulation and forest visualization. The test site is situated in Northern Italy, close to Sover in the Trentino region.

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GeoBrowser3D, a WebGL viewer based on the CesiumJS library: http://geobrowser3d.com
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Cited By

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  • (2019)A Geospatial Decision Support System Tool for Supporting Integrated Forest Knowledge at the Landscape ScaleForests10.3390/f1008069010:8(690)Online publication date: 14-Aug-2019
  • (2018)Visualisation and personalisation of multi-representations city modelsInternational Journal of Digital Earth10.1080/17538947.2018.155012213:5(627-644)Online publication date: 5-Dec-2018
  • (2017)A Web3D forest geo-visualization and user interface evaluationProceedings of the 22nd International Conference on 3D Web Technology10.1145/3055624.3075956(1-9)Online publication date: 5-Jun-2017

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cover image ACM Conferences
Web3D '15: Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on 3D Web Technology
June 2015
274 pages
ISBN:9781450336475
DOI:10.1145/2775292
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 18 June 2015

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Author Tags

  1. 3D forest model
  2. OGC
  3. WebGL
  4. forest production
  5. virtual globe

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  • EC

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Web3D '15
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Overall Acceptance Rate 27 of 71 submissions, 38%

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Cited By

View all
  • (2019)A Geospatial Decision Support System Tool for Supporting Integrated Forest Knowledge at the Landscape ScaleForests10.3390/f1008069010:8(690)Online publication date: 14-Aug-2019
  • (2018)Visualisation and personalisation of multi-representations city modelsInternational Journal of Digital Earth10.1080/17538947.2018.155012213:5(627-644)Online publication date: 5-Dec-2018
  • (2017)A Web3D forest geo-visualization and user interface evaluationProceedings of the 22nd International Conference on 3D Web Technology10.1145/3055624.3075956(1-9)Online publication date: 5-Jun-2017

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