The digital output from these simulations was enormous. The technical and artistic challenge of producing high quality videos of the simulations was the job of Catherine Devine, visualization specialist at the Cornell Theory Center (CTC). "Visualizing the results is a key part of exploring a model," says Deutschman. "If you do simulations based on individual trees in 3D, you should be able to look at each tree. That's very difficult to do and that's where Catherine's work came in."
Initially at least 200 frames were rendered at high resolution for each simulation. Final videos included up to 2000 frames per sequence and a video sequence would consume Gigabytes of space for processing. The MPEG movies in the site are custom-compressed 200-to-1 and ended up at about one Megabyte for the Web. In addition, Devine rendered custom images that included such details as sapling trees and canopy geometry.
"This work is part of our broader program to understand how much detail at the level of individuals is needed to understand the macroscopic dynamics of ecosystems," says Levin, Director of the Princeton Environmental Institute. "The forest growth work, which builds on a model developed by Steve Pacala and others, represents the most important advances to date."
The Cornell Theory Center is supported by the National Science Foundation, New York State, the National Center for Research Resources at the National Institutes of Health, IBM, and other members of CTC's Corporate Partnership Program.
For more information, contact:
Linda Callahan
Director of External Relations
Contact: Linda Callahan
cal@tc.cornell.edu
607-254-8610
Cornell Theory Center
19-Sep-1997