Virtual Reality Visualization of Sustainable Management Practices for Forest Carbon and Climate Change

Landscape visualization can help increase awareness of the benefits of sustainable forest management practices through immersive visualizations, which can allow forest landowners to understand the many benefits of these management practices. This research aims to create highly-realistic virtual forests which are based on scientific forest data. The virtual forest scenarios visually communi-cate the impact of sustainable forest management strategies on forest health, visual character, and ability to sequester carbon. Forest tree models are created using a hybrid approach of photogrammetry and 3D modeling in Maya, and are then imported into Unity, a real-time game design engine. Using Unity’s Hight Definition Render Pipeline (HDRP), the forest scene achieves high levels of realism through the use of shaders and material settings that capture light, shadow, and wind movement. Iterative review of forest scenes by forest ecologists ensures its visual and scientific correctness, followed by adjustments to the scene to improve its visual quality and coherence. The constructed scenes showed forests in different conditions and the result of various natural and human influences.