Global warming has had a huge impact on the environment, climate, and ecology of the North Pole.
In the game, you can become a polar bear of different ages as you go on various quests to explore the Arctic of 2010 to 2018.
The ecological system is balance and stable. Arctic Circle is full of sea ice and various creatures. Polar bears live in excellent condition and stand on top of the food chain here.
Player acts as a baby polar bear. Just walk around to explore the fascinating polar nature spectacle. Don't leave mother bear too far away, and you'll complete this level.
Global warming has changed the environment of the polar circle dramatically. Polar bears' activities are restricted by the decreasing sea ice. It is full of hunger adults who will even hunt the helpless youngs in the polar bear group now.
Player acts as a mother polar bear. You not only must hunt seals to feed bady bear, but also protect baby bear from other hungry adults. Baby bear is hard to survive in the difficult situation. Once the baby bear is gone, you'll enter the final level!!!
The living condition is getting worse continually. A few years later, there's only one polar bear lives in the area.
Player acts a lonely, hungry, and elderly polar bear. The sky is same as its childhood, but everything else has changed ...
We choose a bay located in North-West Canada as the region that we present in the game. https://polarbearsinternational.org/climate-change/status-endangered-polar-bears/ We learned that the polar bear population is declining in 3 areas of Arctic, including Baffin Bay, Kane Basin and S.Beaufort Sea.
We picked some area on the map randomly and dumped historical images in EOSDIS Worldview. We also noticed the location is perfect to present the changement of climate, ice-free & land ratio.
The region, which we present in the game is in the square of (69.6939, -122.5727) and (72.4091, -128.5392).
pick 3~4 years to demostrate here
To perform the polar bear in different age and environment changement, we select maps in the year 2007, 2010, 2016 as different game level's terrains and landscapes. Then, we have to transform the DEM (GeoTiff) or image into a terrain model for the 3D program, for example: Unity.
You can refer this repository for DEM (GeoTiff) file transforming into STL file:
You can also refer to the design in this repo and implement by our team for image transforming into terrain object:
The tool helps you transform an image (jpg/png) into a special grayscale image. Then, you can use GIMP export it to a RAW image. Finally, you can import the RAW image into Unity as a terrain object.
The generated terrain package from RAW image is located in the folder: assets/terrains/arctic/year_map.raw
We have referred to the following information to estimate how many polar bears distribute in the area.
- Polarbears International https://polarbearsinternational.org/
- IUCN PBSG (PolarBear Specialist Group) http://pbsg.npolar.no/
The reference data of polar bear population could be found in the following page http://pbsg.npolar.no/en/status/populations/southern-beaufort-sea.html
According to our design, the region we selected is in the Southern Beaufort Sea area, where the population includes 1,526 polar bears in 2016, but 907 in 2010, and removal 83 per year between 2010 to 2014.
The overall polar bear status of different areas in Arctic is presented in following page: PBSG - Polar Bear Population Map : http://pbsg.npolar.no/en/status/population-map.html Map of Life - Species Distribution Map : https://mol.org/species/Ursus_maritimus
The polar cycle's ecology system can be found in this website.
To implement the complete food chain for polar bear, we imported/modified following 3D models into the game:
- Seal (Ringed Seal)
- Cow
- Deer
- Whale
- Fish
When it is easy to hunt and the polar bear's health is in good condition, the bear may only eat the seal's blubber and skin. Therefore, we also surveyed the Ringed Seal's population, which is also declining in S.Beaufort Sea area.
-
Marine Mammal Laboratory - Polar Ecosystems Program: Ice Seal Distribution Data https://www.afsc.noaa.gov/NMML/polar/research/ice_seal_distribution.php
-
NOAA Fishers - Marine Mammal Stock Assessment Reports by Species/Stock https://www.fisheries.noaa.gov/national/marine-mammal-protection/marine-mammal-stock-assessment-reports-species-stock#pinnipeds---phocids-(earless-seals-or-true-seals)
We also suggested to implement the vegetation distribution besides the marine mammal species. We found NASA has telemetry data for vegetation: https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2016/nasa-studies-details-of-a-greening-arctic
The data could be implemented as the texture of terrain models, or game objects generated by scripts.