Thesis subject

MSc thesis topic: Tangible Landscape 2.0 development

Tangible Landscape (TL) is a tool that combines an ‘old-fashioned’ kinetic sand maquette with modern geographic calculation models through a TL Grass GIS plug-in developed by the North Carolina State University in 2015. Since the beginning of 2024, a landscape architect and GIS experts from WENR have teamed up and developed TL further for its application for the climate-resilient workshop for the Rhine-Waal junction area.

In this workshop, the TL was combined with the flood model SFINCS. At that time, we received positive feedback from participants, especially from people from waterboards, a design company, an engineering company, a drinking water company etc. In their views, TL helped them in understanding the dynamic landscape better. The participants felt encouraged to think up and discuss different scenarios for the future landscape. They appreciated the combination of the tangible sand maquette and the virtual hydrological model. Above all, the participants enjoyed the co-creation process with TL. Particularly, the participants from private engineering and design companies consider TL to be a promising tool for their future application.

In the last several months, TL has been demonstrated at WUR Model & Data Day, Water@WUR, and several design workshops in the Netherlands. People from different backgrounds such as experts from waterboards and municipalities, researchers, and designers, have shown their interest in this tangible tool. Besides, interests from other delta areas are also brought to our TL team. In the Bangladeshi delta, the River Research Institute and Dhaka North City Corporation (DNCC) are both willing to apply Tangible Landscape in their practices. From Yangtzi delta in China, the collaboration wishes have also been delivered from The College of Architecture and Urban Planning (CAUP) of Tongji University, Further, WSP Global Inc and Laos Landschapsarchitecten showed their interest in TL respectively. In their view, TL can potentially engage stakeholders to understand the urgency of climate adaptation actions and to make decisions wisely and efficiently during a design process. Therefore, they are both willing to co-design and co-develop TL with WENR into a useful tool for their future applications.
During the communication with the potential users, many improvement ideas for TL are collected. The urgency for a co-creation tool to help stakeholders understand the landscape system and make decisions for a future-proof landscape by clear comparisons between scenarios is clear!

Therefore, it's time to develop Tangible Landscape 2.0! This innovative TL 2.0 plug-in will be published in QGIS (with open source), which will be more accessible to more potential user groups than that in Grass GIS. A scanner with a higher resolution will replace the current scanner. With this upgrade, TL 2.0 will be able to be applied not only to a small area but also to a large region. The models are for users to choose for their purposes of use. With these further developments, TL 2.0 has a higher potential to revolutionize how users interact with spatial data, offering applications in landscape planning, environmental management, and education. To test TL 2.0, one case in Veluwe and one case in Hongcun, a mountainous area in China will be selected to use TL 2.0 and help local stakeholders in co-creating the future landscape visions with impactful decisions. The application of TL 2.0 in the case in Veluwe aims to visualize the sponge capacity increase by changing waterway and forest types. The specific goals for both cases will be defined in the beginning of the project.

Background

This is a project proposal for TKI Delta Technology 2025. The decision for this proposal will be revealed before 1st May 2025.
The period of the project is from 1 June 2025 - 31 Dec 2027. In 2025 the most technical development of the plug in is planned. In 2026, two applications on the cased will be done. In 2027, the plug-in manual and publication will be published.

Objectives and Research questions

  • TL 2.0 QGIS plug-in: how to translate (part of) the functionality of TL from Grass GIS to QGIS?
  • Which specific user groups will be benefit from this plug-in?
  • How to make this plug in easy to use for different user groups in different countries?

Requirements

  • Knowledge of Python
  • Knowledge of QGIS

Literature and information

Theme(s): Modelling & visualisation; Empowering & engaging communities