Although it is not necessary in land management for a model to closely approximate the system being modeled, validation is useful to test the model's realism. In Section 5.1 the validity of the implementation of the LUCAS model is discussed. Such a simulation must be reasonably fast, as well as valid, to efficiently investigate a large number of land use scenarios. In order to reduce the computational time to a minimum, a parallel version of LUCAS was created which is significantly faster than its serial counterpart. To determine the benefits of this distributed implementation, both LUCAS and pLUCAS are compared in Section 5.2. Although parallelization is a research advancement, much more is yet to be accomplished with this ecological simulation model. Potential future directions for LUCAS are outlined in Section 5.3.