Three-dimensional Landscape Visualizations of Forest Restoration Scenarios for Southern Pine Beetle-Infected Forests

摘要

Setting appropriate goals for projects is a primary challenge facing forest restoration. Not only is it difficult to achieve a complete restoration of an ecosystem, but deciding restoration goals that involves a set of values from diverse stakeholdersis also very challenging. In this study, an integrated technique of geographic information systems (GIS), historic remotely sensed images, and three-dimensional (3-D) landscape visualization was used to construct a variety of realistic images and animations depicting effects following southern pine beetle (SPB) infestations on different forest restoration scenarios in the upper Piedmont of South Carolina The alternative restoration treatments included prescribed burning, mechanical thinning, and the combined effect of both. We also compared the effect of species mixture: pure loblolly pine stands and mixed pine stands within the thinning treatment and thinning + burning treatment. The results indicated that 1) thinning treatment responded the best (i.e., least damage) to SPB infestation for both pure pine stands and mixed forest stands, 2) the presence of other pine or hardwood species would not affect the tree susceptibility but does alter the distance between susceptible trees, 3) the short-term effectiveness of prescribed burning was not obvious in our study, and 4) the thinning + burning treatment may have resulted in too much stress that increases the stand's susceptibility for SPB infestations. In addition, the spatial trends of infestation were illustrated by the photo-realistic geographical visualized medium to simplify the complicated information. This resulted in improvement of the representation and understanding of the SPB restoration scenarios for different decision makers without considerable training or experience with map reading and forest restoration.