Overview

This website is designed to help a user, who is somewhat familiar with World Construction Set (3D Nature, LLC), to create visualizations of forest stand, structure, and composition based on the procedures developed by the University of Wisconsin Department of Forest Ecology and Management for the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources from various data sources.

In order to create visualizations of forests we need the following components:

a. Individual tree images from either field photographs (as found in the tree image library) and tree images designed in-house using TreeProfessional (by Onyx Computing Inc.), a tree design package. The better the tree images, the better the resulting visualizations.

b. Some spatially referenced forest data (individual tree species and sizes and forest composition and density) from forest compartment maps, FIA and other forest inventory sources. This is critical for designing our visualizations for the specific region or ecosystem of interest.

c. World Construction Set (by 3D Nature, LLC), a 3-D visualization package, to combine a and b, integrating information of individual trees with environmental variables to generate a three-dimensional, virtual forest. This program allows forest visualization at any scale of interest, from within-stand to landscape levels.


Many tree images are provided, as well as other forest images such as snags and stumps. Also, several example ecosystem images are provided to show what can be acomplished using World Construction Set and the images found on this site.

If you use the images from the tree and ecosystem libraries, please cite as:

Stoltman, A. M., V. C. Radeloff and D. J. Mladenoff. . Tree image library and forest ecosystem library. http://www.silvis.forest.wisc.edu/visualization/visualization.php last accessed:

We would appreciate also if you could acknowledge both the Department of Forest Ecology and Managment, University of Wisconsin-Madison, and the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources for providing the data.

For further information:

Stoltman, A. M., V. C. Radeloff and D. J. Mladenoff. 2004. Forest Visualization for Management and Planning in Wisconsin. The Journal of Forestry, 102, no. 4:7-13. PDF (contains color, 1.2 Mb)