People affect the environment in which they live in many subtle and complicated ways. In order to better understand the effects of human land-use decisions on the environment, both ecological and socioeconomic factors must be considered. This multidisciplinary approach is taken by the Man and the Biosphere (MAB) project [3], which analyzes the environmental consequences of alternative land-use management scenarios in two geographically distinct regions: the Little Tennessee River Basin (LTRB) in North Carolina and the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State.
The MAB project integrates the diverse disciplines of ecology, economics, sociology, and computer science to evaluate the impacts of land-use. This integration of ideas also requires that data from the various disciplines share a compatible representation. Such forms include tabular and spatial databases, results of mathematical models, spatial models and expert opinions [3]. A geographic information system or GIS, such as the Geographic Resources Analysis Support System (GRASS), can be used to easily store and manipulate the spatially explicit representation of this data. The Land-Use Change Analysis System (LUCAS) is a prototype computer application specifically designed to integrate the multidisciplinary data stored in GRASS and to simulate the land-use policies prescribed by the integration model.