Forest Landscape 3-D Visualization from China´s National Forest Inventory Spatial Database

China has conducted a national forest continuous inventory system for sustainable forest management and large forest inventory spatial databases about tree factors and ecological condition have been built during the inventory work. Digital maps generated from GIS are planar and abstract, while explicit and realistic three-dimensional landscape visualization is much more intuitional and appealing to researchers and other users. Forest landscape visualization can be used to visualize forest structure, dynamics, landscape transformations and regional plans. A three-dimensional virtual reality system of forest landscapes from the inventory database for selected units (compartment or sub-compartment) has been developed based on Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML). ArcGIS Engine and C# was used get stand structure from the database and the terrain was modeled from the DEM. Our study shows that it is appropriate to use forest spatial database for stand and landscape level visualization and it will benefit the decision-making in forest management.