Ecological engineered landscaping (EEL) is a type of landscape design that incorporates ecological principles and aims to provide aesthetic and ecological characteristics to semi-natural environments (Ghosh 2007; Li et al. 2022b). EEL design has an important impact at application level, as it depends on various factors including site suitability, aesthetical and spatial design, ecological engineering, etc. (Addo-Bankas et al. 2022; Li et al. 2022a). Recently, most EEL projects are often undertaken by multidisciplinary teams. Although digital landscape techniques have primarily been integrated with other multifunctional digital toolkits in eco-landscape design, i.e., geodesign software (Steinitz, 2020), microclimate simulation software (Mei et al. 2020), etc. Some comprehensive digital landscape tools and approaches, i.e., LIM, digital techniques, have been sufficiently developed to meet the needs of EEL design.
Development of LIM
Landscape Information Modelling (LIM) is a set of digital workflow and technique that applies geodesign tools and "architecture, engineering, and construction" (AEC) applications to analyse, plan, design, and manage landscape engineering projects (Lu et al. 2017; Picuno et al. 2022). It is believed that LIM-based workflows can support design projects with complex and dynamic eco-landscape characteristics (Kim & Son, 2014). Some of LIM tools (e.g., Lands Design and Rhino Terrain, available for Rhinoceros software) have parametric-aided design capabilities for collaborative design between landscape architecture, urban design, environmental engineering, and environmental geography. Most LIM software provides information processing capabilities for displaying and modifying ecological (e.g., plants, eco-engineering elements), morphological and structural data. A feasible 3D visualisation LIM system was developed in the GIS environment for small-scale terrain eco-engineering and EEL design. Several toolkits, includes unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) scanning and 3D digital LIM system, and image recognition, are integrated into a LIM-based workflow for environmental engineering and region planning (Kim et al. 2023).
Appliable digital technologies in landscape design
In the last decade, digital technologies have been adapted to practical tasks in various design disciplines related to ecological engineering, e.g., green architecture, biodiversity-friendly urban design, etc. (Chen & Xu 2016; Stojanovski et al. 2021; Shan & Sun 2021). A wavelet-transform-based 3-D digital ecological landscaping design method has been constructed with a neural-network-based information fusion model (Chen et al. 2022). Besides, an experimental course on the next-generation Mixed Reality (MR)-based industrial design for the Metaverse was carried out, which put forward a MR-based multidisciplinary method for product design task (Ricci et al. 2023). Stable Diffusion (SD) is a digital text-to-image model based on Latent Diffusion Models (LDMs), which trains a latent diffusion model on a subset of LAION-5B. The model generates images by iteratively denoising data in a latent representation space and then decoding the representation into a full image, which will have great potential in text-to-image generation to aid practical engineering design (Choi et al. 2023).
Digital landscape approach in urban river wetland EEL design
Urban river wetlands are generally defined as seminatural urban wetlands with linear morphology and dynamic water environments, often constituting their unique spatial structure and ecosystem water quality treatment (WQT) function (Wohl et al. 2021). Incorporating EEL measures into riverine wetland construction can develop multiple benefits, enhancing comprehensive urban green infrastructure (GI) (Kelly et al. 2022; Li et al. 2022a). In the traditional conceptual landscape design workflow, most landscape designers use 2D plans and physical models for morphological exploration of landscape elements, which has not allowed the specific 3D visualisation of micro-topologies and realistic virtual plants to be realistically visualised during the design process (Chen & Xu 2016). Meanwhile, the design of many urban constructed wetlands and riverine wetlands has resulted in poor riparian habitat conditions and often failure to achieve their WQT benefits due to the lack of consideration of wetland ecological principles (Luo et al. 2021; Li et al. 2022b).
However, there is currently a lack of approaches to assist landscape architects in the detailed design of urban river wetland EEL projects (Mariarinaldi 2007; Li et al. 2022b), and only a few practical digital landscape methods and technologies for river wetland EEL have been put forward. Digital landscape design tools, e.g., design workflows with LIM-based approach, Geodesign tools, SD-based tools, are rarely included in compulsory undergraduate courses (Steinitz 2020; Na 2021), while only some digital modelling and image processing software has been widely taught in current undergraduate landscape architecture education and training (Calleja-Perucho et al. 2015). Although some design education studies have put forward ‘technology-driven process model’ for engineering design (Kim et al, 2023), there is still a lack of relevant teaching that can be applied to the education of both landscape architects and civil engineers with 'multi-objective thinking' (Brown & Bunt 2022). In addition, there is still no appropriate method for evaluation of the design efficacy of digital landscape workflows in urban river wetland EEL projects.