An integrated system for 3D tree modeling and growth simulation

Virtual Geographic Environments (VGEs) represent a new analytical tool for understanding geographic processes. Among the fundamental solutions to advancing and deepening the development of VGEs are geographic modeling, geographic simulation, and geographic knowledge sharing. Forest is a major component of the geographic environment. This article proposes an integrated approach for analyzing and exploring plant growth processes and the relationship between plant growth and the environment, and describes the development of a software prototype that integrates ontology, artificial intelligence (AI) and virtual plant techniques. The strategy is as follows: First, we collect existing information on the growth and development patterns, morphological structure, and environment of a chosen plant from the botany, forestry, and ecology literature. Then, we construct an ontology framework to organize the collected information and individual cases into a knowledge base and support the inferential reasoning, botanical modeling and simulation. Through rule-based reasoning (RBR) and case-based reasoning (CBR), complex relationships between tree growth and the environment can be extracted. Next, the newly derived knowledge is integrated with a 3D method for modeling the growth of individual tree based on the same ontology framework. Finally, based on the description of the tree species, environment, growth stage, and phenophase, among other factors, key tree morphology parameters are derived via semantic reasoning. Using these parameters, a new 3D tree model is generated that is consistent with the specific habitat and growth phase. Our approach is useful for users who have little knowledge of botany or who lack the computer skills to construct realistic 3D tree models that are faithful to botanical features.