Although the LUCAS Project has set a precedent for landscape change simulation, it is not the final solution to ecological landscape modeling. Much more research needs to be done both ecologically and computationally in this field. An immediate addition to LUCAS could be the integration of the multinomial logit coefficients for the Dungeness Watershed, also on the the Olympic Peninsula. Data already exists and is in place, so these additional scenarios could be immediately incorporated into the package.
The first extension to the existing code itself could be the addition of other impact modules, such as water quality or additional species impacts. The species habitat module could also be reconstructed in such a way that the user could easily and dynamically define a habitat, thereby alleviating the need for predefined routines. Naturally performance will continue to be an issue, making the migration to such a dynamic system more challenging. Similarly, other transition probability modules could be created which would not require an economist to generate a table of coefficients a priori, rather a land manager could simply define a scenario and run it in the same sitting. The economist's knowledge would then have to be encoded in some other fashion than is currently employed.
The next most obvious future need will be simulations on larger maps or at higher resolution which will increase the already sizeable demand on the computer's resources. A natural solution would be to spatially distribute portions of the maps across many processors of a supercomputer or a network of workstations, having each node calculate a portion of the map. For pixel-based simulations this would be fairly straightforward, but patch-based modeling would be much more challenging. Issues such as patch unification, I/O, and data reassembly would be other major hurdles.
Currently, the Integrated Modeling System (IMS) for the Southern Global Change Program (sponsored by the USDA Forest Service) is adapting LUCAS for the study of forest response to environmental stress, disturbances, and land use changes in the southeastern United States. The study region is orders of magnitude larger than the initial test watersheds already implemented, so parallelism may be the only solution to challenges on this scale.