SIMULATION OF FOREST EVOLUTION Effects of Environmental Factors to Trees Growth

摘要

Out of the complexity and variety of plant communities, it is a challenging task to simulate the structure and dynamics of plant communities. In this paper we simulate and visualize the evolution of forests by the tree growth model influenced by the environmental factors. The environmental factors we considered include illumination, terrains and resource competition among trees. We develop our tree growth model based on the forest gap model by effectively incorporating the above environmental factors. The system is implemented with Visual C++ 6.0 and OpenGL. We compare the growth of trees (their heights and DBHs) which are of different ages or located in different regions. We also show changes of trees distribution within certain landscape for a long period of time (more than two hundred years). The illuminating and interesting experimental results show that our simulation technique is effective.