Virtual battlefields devoid of vegetation deprive soldiers of valuable training in the critical aspects of terrain tactics and terrain-based situational awareness. Barren landscapes fail to provide trainees with necessary visual cues required to grasp the scale of their surroundings. Without the cover of vegetation, targets are easily visible from the air. Line of sight calculations become simply a matter of sorting elevations. There is a need to (re)introduce vegetation into the virtual battlefield to improve training effectiveness while minimizing the expenses typically incurred building such terrains.This paper discusses the current state of the open source project GENETICS and how simulationists can use GENETICS to quickly and cheaply build large-scale natural environments to improve training effectiveness. It will also briefly touch upon level-of-detail techniques and ecotype modeling and how GENETICS is used to generate land cover data where none exists.
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