Introduction

The GESO (Google Earth Sustainable Outlook) project visualises the results of the the NL later project in Google Earth (GE). The satelite images of GE are a nice reference for both the current as the projected land use and GE has many navigation functions, e.g. to fly over the country at different view heights.

The project is a cooperation of the PBL (Netherland Environmental Asssessment Agency), the WUR and Object Vision.

Results

Click here (NL) for results of the GESO project.

Examples

The current land use projection makes use of 3dShapes, a database with 3d topographical objects, classified to the LUMOS functional land use classes, see figure 1:

figure 1, 3dShapes used to visualise current land use

For the projected land use, different techniques are developed and evaluated:

• 2d polygons (small scale), see figure 2
• 2d iconographic, see figure 3
• 3d icons (large scale) see figure 4

figure 2, 2d polygons to visualise changes in current land use at a small scale

figure 3, 2d iconographic projection to visualise changes in current land use at a medium scale

figure 4, 3d icons to visualise changes in current land use at a large scale

Current and future land use projections can also be combined in one view.

KeyWords

• 3d Visualisation of current and future land use
• Whole of the Netherlands
• Google Earth satelite images and navigation functions
• Functional classification of land use types based on LUMOS classification
• Spatial indexstructure to download and visualise only relevant information

Period

The GESO project started at the end of 2007 and finished in the summer of 2008.