Low-Cost Workflow for 3D Urban Forest Virtual Reconstruction

This contribution addresses, on one hand, the increasing need and demand of 3D data (e.g., point clouds) in urban forestry – for monitoring, analysis, and visualisation purposes –, on the other, the lack of standardised procedures to manage them, also towards engaging and empowering the broader audience. Practitioners in landscape architecture – as a potential bridging field between forestry, geomatics and computer science – could ‘smartly’ manage dynamic ecosystems as forests, parks, and gardens in urban contexts if efficiently provided with digital tools, technologies and techniques for design-oriented information. To this end, a lowcost workflow for 3D virtual reconstruction of under-storey urban vegetation is here proposed to allow exploiting the aesthetic, analytical, and generative potential of 3D point clouds in landscape and urban design. As a proof-of-concept, a combination of a wide range of methods (e.g., spherical photogrammetry, point cloud modelling, virtual reality), tools (e.g., 360° camera, tablet with lidar sensor), and software (e.g., Agisoft Metashape, 3DF Zephyr, CloudCompare, Unity) is tested in the development of a virtual plot of the Mesiano University park in Trento (Italy). Covering all the different steps of the information management activities (namely acquisition, processing, and visualisation), the presented workflow enables a GIS-based, texturized, real-world 3D point cloud rendering of urban forests to be intuitively and interactively experienced in Virtual Reality.