Study On Simulation Of Forest Stand Growth And Management Based On Vitual Forest Environment

Information visualization in forest resource management is one of the important issues in forest science. The appearance of Virtual Forest Environment(VFE) provides a new platform for visualization of forest information. Forest growth modeling is a key technology in forestry informatization. Modeling the procedure and result of forest natural growth and management via Virtual Forest Environment is a challenging task, which is important in many aspects including forest management and decision-making, forest landscape planning and forest teaching, etc. An efficient approach to construct virtual forest environment based on forestry inventory database and interactively parameterized tree modeling is presented in the paper. Then the principle and method of modeling forest growth and forest administration in a 3-D virtual forest are shown, through the study of oriented the region of Fujian Province forest growth model and management model. The main content of this paper is as follows. 1. The advancement of related research fields is summarized detailedly from three aspects, i.e., forest growth model and forest management model, geometric modeling and rendering of single tree and forest visualization. The drawback of above research is also pointed out. 2. The concept, content and principle to construct a virtual forest environment are discussed. An approach for interactively parameterized tree modeling is presented and the geometric model library of typical tree species in Fujian Province is built. Then the method of 3-D terrain modeling based on regular grid is studied. On this foundation realistic rendering and optimized rendering algorithms of virtual forest scene are discussed. 3. Due to the lack of individual tree information in forest inventory data, a whole-to-individual means is presented to simulate forest spatial data based on forest stand structure laws. Then the method of modeling forest stand natural growth in virtual forest environment and problems encountered in the simulation are discussed on the basis of the models including tree competition model, growth prediction model, and mortality model, etc. 4. An approach to simulate forest stand management based on Virtual Forest Environment is put forward. Taking example for forest intermediate cuttings and forestation, through the study on the theory of forest stand density control and related technology criterion, the method and related problems of simulating forest changes under forest management are studied. 5. On the basis of study of related theories and algorithms, an oriented forest management virtual forest prototype—virtual forest growth and management modeling system is developed. The system uses forest inventory data as data source and implement the following functions: 2-D map management, virtual forest cruising, forest stand growth modeling, forest stand management modeling and statistics of forest information. Finaly the case analysis and result verification is shown, taking the forest in Zhangpu County, Fujian Province as an example.