A 3D View of the Past | Jeffrey Varga

The full project presentation can be found here:

I was featured as a presenter for this project at the 2023 annual meeting of the Oregon Chapter of the American Fisheries Society.

This project is a historical 3D reconstruction of the Coquille River Basin as it likely existed prior to widespread European settlement in the mid-19th century. While the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife had long been interested in visualizing the basin in its pre-European condition, the work had never been undertaken due to its technical complexity. By recreating historical vegetation and terrain in three dimensions, this project provides a visual framework for comparison between past and present landscapes, helping illustrate the long-term ecological impacts of human land use. Beyond its analytical value, the project also emphasizes the power of immersive visualization to make historical environmental data more accessible and engaging.

The workflow began in ArcGIS Pro, where historical vegetation data from Patricia Brenner’s 1991 reconstruction report was digitized into a multi-polygon shapefile representing more than twenty vegetation types from the 1850s to 1870s.

A USGS-sourced DEM was then used to model terrain, which was imported into Blender using the BlenderGIS plugin, resulting in a highly detailed 3D mesh.

Historical imagery was overlaid and manually edited to remove modern features, while the vegetation shapefile served as a spatial mask for rendering forest types.

Vegetation was generated using a combination of Blender plugins, including Sequoia, AlphaTrees, and Scatter 5, each balancing realism and performance differently. Significant challenges emerged around mesh errors, hard polygon edges, and hardware limitations, which ultimately required scaling back the study area. Despite these constraints, the project has received strong feedback and laid the groundwork for future expansion into other areas of the basin.