Computational Ecology

for Landscape Architects

Brendan Harmon

Design Research

Ecological Robotics
Computational Ecology
Historic Preservation
Point Cloud Modeling

Ecological Robotics

Construction Robotics

Drone Data Analytics

Atlas of Heritage Trees

Heritage Preservation

Rosedown

Le Petit Versailles

African American Burial Grounds

With an interdisciplinary team of colleagues, I have begun a long term project to preserve a record of the burial grounds of enslaved African Americans and their descendants. In the American South, These sites have long faced precarious conditions; originally built peripheral to antebellum plantations, today many occupy remnant parcels of isolated land. Climate change, industrial expansion, precarious land-tenure records, and dwindling populations of descendant communities threaten these cultural landscapes. The aim of this project is to develop a methodology for documenting the history, material culture, ecological character, and soundscapes of these neglected heritage sites. Here is a point cloud of Alford Cemetery captured by a drone with a lidar module. With drone lidar, we can record these landscapes and their surroundings from above at centimeter resolution.

Point Cloud Modeling

Future Research

Project: field robotics
Paper: computational aesthetics
Book: computational ecology
GIS plugins: earthworks and mass flows of water and sediment
Grasshopper plugins: lidar & geospatial analytics

My future plans include creative applications of field robotics, a paper on computational aesthetics, a book on computational ecology, and plugin development. I plan to explore new ecological applications for field robotics such as mobile lidar scanning, rapid ecological censuses, procedural mowing, spot burning of weeds, and experiment with different planting and seeding systems. I plan to write a paper on computational aesthetics that delves into contemporary philosophies such as object oriented ontology and vital materialism. Now that I have finished writing my book on computational design for landscape architects which is due out this May, I plan to write a new textbook on computational ecology. Recently I developed a GIS plugin for simulating landscape evolution. Now I plan to develop open source GIS plugins for grading and earthworks and erosion modeling. I also plan to develop open source Grasshopper plugins for lidar analytics and terrain analysis.

Learn more at baharmon.github.io