"stm31415" <sam### [at] cscom> wrote:
> I'm being told to get offline, so I haven't gotten more than a page into the
> PDF, but I assume there is some way of determining how a plant is replaced?
> Can it depend on elevation, or water concentration? That is, do I get to
> make an image (or something) that would allow variations in the ecosystem,
> have a higher plant density at a creek and lower on rocky ground, with
> varaiation in the type of population in each area? It seems like it would
> be too hard to give the replacement a type given a probability map for the
> set of possible plants. I just going off the top of my head here, but this
> is really, really cool - it's got me excited.



Thank you!
In fact such a tool is always a fake. I try not to confuse it with reality -
it only has to simulate it. This is because of the control paramenters which
I cannot adjust in a correct way simply because I don't know them. By
example, what is the optimum soil humidity for nettles? At least nettles
seem to grow everywhere, so they can tolerate many conditions from sunny to
pure shady locations. Perhaps they tolerate conditions other plants simply
don't like, but aren't good in competing with other species. In this
respect my model won't be very different from a pure guess.

For water availability I got a tip of Prof. Deussen, one of the Xfrog
authors.
The function, which defines the ground can also serve as approximation to
water content.

Rocks are easy - they cast shadows. A simple image which defines shadowing
from rocks, big plants, houses and so on is sufficient to define smaller
and less dense vegetation near rocks. Near trees you have to consider the
roots too, which lower water availability at those points.

Probability maps are nice. In fact I used simple examples for some of my
images. But with a little practice you can see the difference to an
iterative approach.


Norbert Kern

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