Malte Clasen

Interactive Visual Simulation of Coastal Landscape Change
Philip Paar, Katy Appleton, Malte Clasen, Maria Gensel, Simon Jude, Andrew Lovett
ISDE 2008

Abstract
This paper describes and evaluates the application of the interactive landscape visualisation system Biosphere3D in a case study of cliff erosion in Norfolk, on the eastern coast of England. The study builds upon previous work on coastal zone management by the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at the University of East Anglia. Biosphere3D is an open-source system, which supports multiple scales on a virtual globe, loads GIS data at runtime, and focuses on real-time rendering of vegetation and foreground detail. The 3D landscape model has been developed by using scientific modelling data on cliff retreat to define changes in digital elevation models and then incorporating other spatially referenced content to represent natural and man-made features. We compare the use of Biosphere 3D with previously-employed visualisation techniques and discuss the requirements of digital globes to support more convincing depiction of local visual landscape impacts of global change.

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