Hi, I'm Eoin. I'm from Sydney but live in San Francisco (USDA zone 10b) and spend a fair amount of time up north in Marin County (USDA zone 10a). Something I'm especially interested in is food forests in the urban and suburban environment, and how these can nudge cultural awareness in our modern society. I see common patterns in permaculture and would love to encode them into software to generate permaculture master plans, starting with people's back yards. If the intersection of permaculture design, data and 3d modeling is something you're interested in I'd love to connect.
Hi Eoin and welcome, One of the perpetual issues with Permaculture is how to document key environmental aspects of a property, develop systems and placements, and finally present the design to clients. I've seen everything from rough pencil sketches to literally hand-drawn art to SketchUp, to Photoshop. Each graphic depiction was backed-up by charts and graphs showing the climate/environmental data and client's desires upon which the design was based. An integrated package for this would be great. A free (or at least inexpensive) program would be even better. Tough order ... is it do-able?
It's definitely possible to aggregate all the land/weather/solar/environment data sets into one place, which is effort but doable. Photogrammetry via drone footage looks like the path forwards for creating a digital embodiment of land, which then allows for modeling (satellite footage is proving difficult to get sufficient terrain detail on anything but broad strokes earthwork designs). Automating that modeling.... is a big unknown. One the one hand permaculture has patterns and systems which are observable and repeatable (to a point), so that lends well towards software models. On the other hand, local nuance will always get lost - the question is whether you can build a good-enough system by crowdsourcing permaculturalists' knowledge, or whether every site has to be done ad hoc on a case by case basis.