Current techniques for the creation and exploration of virtual worlds are largely unable to generate sound natural environments from ecological data and to provide interactive web-based visualizations of such detailed environments. We tackle this challenge and propose a novel framework that (i) explores the advantages of landscape maps and ecological statistical data, translating them to an ecologically sound plant distribution, and (ii) creates a visually convincing 3D representation of the natural environment suitable for its interactive visualization over the web. Our vegetation model improves techniques from procedural ecosystem generation and neutral landscape modeling. It is able to generate diverse ecological sound plant distributions directly from landscape maps with statistical ecological data. Our visualization model integrates existing level of detail and illumination techniques to achieve interactive frame rates and improve realism. We validated with ecology experts the outcome of our framework using two case studies and concluded that it provides convincing interactive visualizations of large natural environments.

Interactive 3D visualization of natural environments can help ecologists, policy makers and the broad public in general to better understand, promote and protect both existing and developing environments. The creation and exploration of virtual worlds can be very helpful for this purpose. However, current techniques are not able to generate sound complex natural environments from ecological data for the use of interactive webbased visualizations. In this thesis, we approach the challenge of developing and interactively visualizing in real time ecologically accurate and visually convincing models of complex natural environments over the web. For this, we propose a framework that (i) is able to combine landscape maps and ecological statistical data, translating them to an ecologically sound plant distribution, and (ii) creates a detailed 3D representation of the natural environment and provides for its fully interactive visualization in real-time over the web. The main contributions of this research are a procedural method to generate complete and sound natural environments and a web-based renderer that is able to real-time visualize complex natural environments with their high density and variability of individual organisms. The vegetation model combines and improves techniques from procedural ecosystem generation and neutral landscape modeling. It is able to generate diverse ecological sound plant distribution directly from landscape maps with statistics about coverage and patchiness of plant species. The visualization model uses several existing level-of-detail and illumination techniques to achieve interactive frame rates and improve realism. Validation of the results with ecology experts led us to conclude that our framework provides convincing interactive visualizations of large virtual natural environments.iii