Research areas
Ecosystems and Urban Forests
Entire landscapes can be authored by combining ecosystems and erosion, as shown in this paper. An urban forest can also be considered a special case of an ecosystem, as shown in this, where we find tree location, and we generate an inverse procedural model showing where and how to plant the trees. An early paper considered the urban forest as an unbalanced ecosystem, where the disturbance is caused by pruning, removing unwanted plants, planting in order, etc. Several earlier works studied the effect of virtual agents on ecosystems. An interesting approach is to simulate ecosystems interactively and even while considering animals.
We have also developed the first algorithm that finds the location of trees in an urban environment (urban forest) that has also been used and extended for tree counting. The figure below shows the result of the procedural tree positioning in a hypothetical scenario of Central Park in New York. An older paper also shows urban forests as affected by how people care about the trees.
One of the critical aspects is the plant development. Our developmental model allows for creating windy trees that show the urban forest under the influence of wind.
