Articles by Sara Zanni

The Tiber Valley Project aims to create a series of digital applications for 3D reconstructing, visualization and real time browsing of the ancient and current Tiber Valley landscape (particularly for the Villa dei Volusii and Lucus Feroniae areas), in four different historical phases. In this perspective, the first problem to face is the need for a valid methodology for ancient landscape ecosystem reconstruction, before dealing with monuments and building. On the basis of an intense multi-disciplinary discussion and the previous VH Lab experience in this field, in this article we are presenting a scheme for a standardized reconstruction procedure, where the landscape is built using all available sources and elevation data obtained by a photogrammetry process on historical pictures. Ecosystem areas are then calculated through GIS elaboration in GRASS-GIS environment, through a procedure which may be shared for any situation of historical landscape reconstruction, allowing the matching and the mathematical processing of geographical data aimed to the definition of different ecological areas (both in terms of natural vegetation and cultivated lands). Maps are then created to be imported in procedural landscape generation engines: the last part of the paper focuses on the lack of effective open source software in this field, and a possible proposal implementation in this sense.