Modelling, Simulation, and Visualization of Forest Ecosystems

We present a framework for the simulation of forests, where a complex application system simulates a spontaneous afforestation process. Within this virtual environment, trees can be seen to grow over several centuries. The obtained simulation results are used to animate ecosystem development, where trees struggle for survival. The visualization of trees is speeded up so that the models of trees have progressively lower-details proportional to the distance from a certain point of view. The growth of individual trees is also animated, from the development of branch complexity to per-leaf precision to allow a very realistic perception of the emerging ecosystem.