Landscape pattern is a product of the interaction between ecological and socioeconomic processes. Understanding the function and structure of landscapes, primarily in terms of human impacts, requires integration of biological and socioeconomic knowledge. Natural resource managers, in particular, need this integration to effectively evaluate the social and environmental consequences of alternative management scenarios. The Man and the Biosphere (MAB) project where land use and its impacts are compared between the Olympic Peninsula and the Southeastern Appalachian Biosphere reserves [8], is a program whose mission is to address these issues.
This project integrates knowledge spanning many disciplines in order to evaluate land use and its impacts. Integration requires not only interpretation across disciplines, but also compatibility in the different forms of data acquired. Such forms include spatial and tabular databases, results of mathematical models, spatial analyses, and expert opinions. Unfortunately, conventional approaches of integrating and applying knowledge are not adequate to examine the complex and highly-variable ecological and socioeconomic issues that influence human land-use decision making and the impacts these have on landscapes [2].
Technologies are now available to facilitate the development
of a multidisciplinary model for studying
sustainability. Geographic information systems such as the
Geographic Resources Analysis Support System
(GRASS)
developed by the U.S. Army Construction Engineering Research
Laboratories [12] can easily be used to represent and
manipulate spatial data on workstations. In addition,
adaptive management approaches
provide a conceptual framework from which to evaluate
alternative scenarios [7]. The
Land-Use Change Analysis System (LUCAS)
is a prototype computer application specifically designed to
integrate ecological and socioeconomic information using GRASS
for adaptive approaches to landscape management.
The motivating integration model for LUCAS is discussed in Section 1.1 followed by a brief discussion of the goals and objectives of LUCAS in Section 1.2. Section 2 details the socioeconomic model used in the current LUCAS prototype, and Section 3 reveals how C++ programming constructs are used to implement these models in LUCAS. The graphical user interface (GUI) which handles interactions between the LUCAS modules and the user, communications between system modules, and display of model outputs is discussed in Section 4. In Section 5, LUCAS is used to simulate selected scenarios of land-use management policies in the Little Tennessee River Basin (western NC) and the Hoh Watershed (Olympic Peninsula) in order to estimate projected changes in the landscape and associated impacts on selected species for 100 years (starting from year 1991). The current state of LUCAS software development and availability are provided in Section 6.