Comprehensive Data Visualization for CFD and Forest Growth Simulations in eRobotics Systems for Forest Planning and Storm Damage Prevention

CFD and forest growth simulators are very special systems that are difficult to handle and require specific knowledge in the addressed domains; furthermore, commonly provided visualizations of the results are hard to understand and analyze, in particular to people not so deeply involved in the specific area of expertise. The need for such simulations became clear in 2007 when the windstorm "Kyrill" hit Europe and caused massive damages to the forests. Proper storm and growth simulations can support forest planning to prevent such damages in the future. The recently introduced concepts of eRobotics aim to bridge the gap between expert systems and comprehensive software applications by supporting the understanding of complex simulation results with realistic virtual environments. In this paper, we extend the eRobotics approach to forest planning domains, where forestryrelated simulations are combined with intuitive visualization approaches in order to act as decision support system to optimize future forest developments under ecological and sustainable aspects. Keywords-computational fluid dynamics; forest growth simulations; data visualization; VR simulation systems; eRobotics;