Early users of LUCAS are expected to be experts in landscape management. Explicit knowledge of the integration of socioeconomic and ecological variables (see Section 2) using the software design discussed in the previous section is not required by users such as ecologists, economists, sociologists, or forestry personnel. To accommodate the needs of such experts, a graphical user interface (GUI) was developed for LUCAS. A GUI is the best way to provide an intuitive interface for an application which integrates interdisciplinary data of different scales and type. One of the most challenging aspects of designing an intuitive interface for LUCAS was to first understand the needs of landscape management, and then to develop the interface with these requirements in mind.