In amongst all the tropical work, we've been looking at some more urban and suburban trees. Phil has been leading work looking at London trees - more on that soon, but he's posted some great 3D models on Sketchfab including this amazing scan of Russell Square.
Some of these trees are pretty stunning - here's a montage of some of them extracted from the scans above. Particularly striking is the fact that they're all London planes, but they have such different crown shapes. So what makes a plane a plane or an oak an oak? It's the old nature v nurture / genotype v phenotype debate again - how plastic are these shapes?
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| A range of Plane trees extracted from the Russell Square scans above, ordered by size, with the estimated mass below. (Phil Wilkes) |
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| Trees located in the Environment Agency lidar data over Bloomsbury, coloured by height from brown to dark green (Phil Wilkes). |
Meanwhile, we've been doing some scanning for a new BBC4 documentary, which aims to uncover the overlooked biodiversity of suburban gardens. The production team have spent a year monitoring and filming all aspects of life in a row of 7 contiguous back gardens in leafy Welwyn Garden City, one of Sir Ebenezer Howard's original New Towns, arising out of the Garden City movement. We've scanned one of the gardens in early Spring, to show the new leaves and the 3D 'bird's eye view'. Phil's lovely 3D view is great, with fly-throughs to come.
Meanwhile, Matheus has been running his leaf / wood separation code on the point cloud, to extract the leaf points, so we can estimate the leaf area on the trees. Here's a rather elegant little apple tree.
Thanks to Pat and Steve for letting us trample in their lovely back garden. We'll be back there soon to film with the team and discuss the results, and this will be aired in summer 2017. Exciting!https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-uniform_rational_B-spline
