Michael Barton's SERV project is a visualization of a GRASS-based land-use model. The model generates land surfaces for a given location over a period of time. Input to the model includes parameters like vegetation coverage, rainfall, and agricultural patterns.

Decision Theater software engineer, Jeff Conner, made a visualization program that displays the successive time-steps. The software can be configured to write each image frame to disk in order to generate movies (like below).

Michael Barton's GRASS-based land-use model for the Wadi Ziqlab watershed in northern Jordan showing 34 years of erosion.

The above movie shows the results of the simulation run with low vegetation coverage (C-factor 0.8) and heavy rainfall (R-factor 10). There is also a Virtual Reality application that shares most of the same core functionality. Below is a movie of the same model results loaded in the Decision Theater's multi-screen environment.

Same model results as above but shown in the Decision Theater.

More about Michael's NSF funded research in Mediterranean Landscape Dynamics can be found here.

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