Low-Cost 3D Virtual and Dynamic Reconstruction Approach for Urban Forests: The Mesiano University Park

Abstract

Urban forests, parks, and gardens are fundamental components of urban sustainability, resilience, and regenerative dynamics. Designers, architects, and landscape architects could smartly manage these dynamic ecosystems if efficiently provided with design-oriented digital tools, technologies, and techniques. However, practitioners lack knowledge and standardized procedures for their uses. The rise of low-cost sensors to generate 3D data (e.g., point clouds) in forestry can also effectively support monitoring, analysis, and visualization purposes for greenery in urban contexts. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach—involving the fields of forestry, geomatics, and computer science—this contribution addresses these issues and proposes a low-cost workflow for 3D virtual reconstructions of urban forests to support information management activities and thus landscape architecture applications. By connecting a wide range of methods (i.e., spherical photogrammetry, point cloud modeling), tools (i.e., 360° camera, tablet with lidar sensor), and software (i.e., Agisoft Metashape, CloudCompare, Autodesk AutoCAD), the proposed workflow is defined and tested in the development of dynamic virtual representations for a plot of the Mesiano University park in Trento (Italy). Finally, comparing acquisition, processing, and elaboration methodologies and their results, the possibility of developing digital twins of urban forests is envisioned.

Territorial Digital Twins: A key for increasing the community resilience of fragile mountain inner territories?

“…Volunteered, crowdsourced and social media data and geographic information can provide insights about the opinions, needs, perceptions and movement patterns of local communities both in urban and rural environments, useful to define design requirements and strategies (Nikšič et al, 2017; Witanto et al, 2018). Therefore, both studies consider urban design and planning, landscape architecture and civic innovation – and hacking – as key parts of the larger social and infrastructural webbing of a territory, and raise questions about data and information interoperability in all their multidimensional aspects (Chioni, Barbini, et al, 2021). This aligns with the “real‐time” and “senseable” city conceptualisations (Calabrese & Ratti, 2006; Kloeckl et al, 2012; Ratti & Claudel, 2016) – mentioned in the previous section – which assume physical and social networks to be in constant interplay.…”