WebGL virtual globe for efficient forest production planning in mountainous area

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.