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

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.