Utilizing 360° photography and virtual reality to analyze forest habitat structure following a major hurricane

Many forestry studies rely on obtaining measurements on forest structure, canopy cover, tree density, and other variables through the use of manual labor which is time-consuming, expensive, and labor-intensive, especially when following a major hurricane. Here we propose utilizing 360° photography and virtual reality as a new suitable method and alternative to traditional forest inventories to enable the rapid collection of forest habitat and structure variables in recently hurricane-impacted areas.
In this paper, we present our methods from the Forests After Florence project as a case study in conducting forest/habitat analysis utilizing images from a 360° camera analyzed using a virtual reality headset. We found this new method to be effective in the analysis of forest habitat and structure variables following a hurricane and this technique would be more time-efficient and beneficial for researchers in a time crunch as well as community members in impacted areas. This is especially tr..., This dataset consists of 360° photographs from the Forests After Florence project. These photographs were taken by students at North Carolina State University six months after Hurricane Florence made landfall in the state of North Carolina. The photos were taken using a Ricoh Theta V 360° camera at various sites in hurricane-impacted areas in Southeastern North Carolina. We selected disaster-impacted students attending North Carolina State University to select up to 10 locations where known damage occurred as a result of Hurricane Florence and an additional 10 control sites were assigned. Students then drove to each of their sites and took 360° photos from the ground using a 5-inch tripod and higher up using a selfie stick. For our photos, we primarily chose to utilize the selfie photos so that is what has been primarily uploaded., , # 360° Photos from the Forests After Florence Project

## Description of the data and file structure

1. Number of Photos: 354
2. Total file size: 2.33 GB
3. File format: JPG

## Reuse Potential

The 360° photo data collected have a high reuse potential, especially when used to analyze temporal trends from a time series of images.

## Ethical Considerations

In order to adhere to the best practices of sharing human subjects data, each individual photo was carefully screened for direct and indirect identifiers. For privacy purposes, any student seen within a photo has been blurred. In addition, vehicle identifiers such as license plates have also been blurred as well. Any photos named by students that include their family name or address have also been renamed.

Each photo was analyzed and individually blurred using GIMP 2.10.12. For each photo where a student could be seen, we used the rectangular select tool to select the region to be blurred and then we applied a gaussian blur. All...