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Kansas
Visualization - Animations
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Visualizations
using animation provide a greater sense of the process of land cover
change recorded by multi-temporal imagery. By representing real world
time in years with animation time in seconds, this display method
represents change in the same way that we are familiar with viewing
it in the real world. The animated visualizations for Kansas were
created using a different approach than the static renderings. This
was done because the resulting product needs to describe the change
between years, rather than the before and after snapshots produced
by the still frames. Within a GIS, classification comparisons were
created between each consecutive date pair of forest cover data. This
process reduced the six dates classified imagery to five change comparison
images. In VNS, instead of using static ecotypes, as with the still
visualizations, the changing land cover classes were replaced with
animated ecotypes to match the classification comparison results.
Once the classified comparison data and animated ecotypes were brought
together in VNS, animations were created by selecting a camera location
and defining the time interval to be rendered.
Animated visualization for the Kansas study area used the same classified
data sets as the static visualizations, but recreated the changing
forest cover as a dynamic process rather than individual moments in
time. By animating the appearance or removal of trees in much the
same fashion that forest cover would change in the real world, viewers
of these animations can experience the events of the landscape history
of this area. Animated visualizations can be used as a stand-alone
data exploration tool for drawing conclusions regarding the nature
of the changing forest cover. Used in connection with quantitative
patch structure measurements, the animations provide a visual reference
in a qualitative format. To demonstrate this concept, the final Kansas
animation was amended to include graphs of several landscape metrics
(area, number of patches, average patch size and total edge), which
are displayed in an animated fashion that progresses in time with
the visualization.
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(Click
the image to view the animation)
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