A Research Project by Jennifer Messel
The Undergraduate
Research Opportunities Program (UROP) at the University of Minnesota and gives
undergraduate students the chance to design and complete a research project in
collaboration with a faculty advisor. Under the advisement of Dr. Harlen Stech at the University of Minnesota, Duluth, I have been working on a
UROP project entitled "Graphical Visualization of a Tree Growth Process
Model". This project works in conjunction with the ECOPHYS project involving the growth
process model of Aspen and hybrid poplars. This visualization tool will enable the ECOPHYS
model team to simplify the debugging and determine the accuracy of the model.
ECOPHYS is an established mechanistic individual tree process model that represents the growth response of plants to altered CO2 and ozone concentrations, as well as climate changes. The model predicts the growth rates of trees numerically based on nutrient, sunlight exposure, precipitation, and groundwater data in combination with component mathematical models for different aspects of growth processes. Included in these sub-models are photosynthetic rate, nutrient transport, groundwater movement and uptake, respiration, and leaf shading.
Using a visualization package called Geomview, I have created a program that produces a realistic scientific visualization tool representing the data generated by the ECOPHYS model. Geomview was created by staff members of the Geometry Center at the University of Minnesota. It is an interactive program that allows the user to view and manipulate three-dimensional geometric objects. These objects are created using combinations of data types provided by Geomview. The real advantage of using Geomview for this project is its ability to serve as a display engine for other programs. These programs, called external modules, interact with Geomview through a mathematical algorithm that create the objects that will be displayed. For the ECOPHYS project, the external module I created reads in data from a file created by the ECOPHYS model. The module processes this information and converts it into objects for Geomview to display.
Next: The Program Overview
Contents
This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. DBI-9723595. Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation (NSF).
