The Land-Use Change Analysis System is a valuable prototype tool for modeling changes in a landscape to better understand human influence on the environment. LUCAS has already been used by several investigators to better understand land management and change in the LTRB and the Hoh watersheds [28,36,38,39]. Based on the validation results, the environmental scientists working on the project have confirmed their model. Future development of the LUCAS concept will be facilitated by other projects such as the Strategic Environmental Research and Development Program (SERDP) at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) and the IMS for the Southern Global Change Program.
As a computer application, LUCAS takes an object-oriented approach to simulation in hopes of promoting code-reusability and versatility for future adaptations. It addresses the problem of efficiently managing a large quantity of spatially explicit data, applying a stochastic model (both pixel- and patch-based), and collecting meaningful statistics. pLUCAS offers a distributed solution to the same problem, thus opening the door for larger, more complex simulations on a network of workstations or a supercomputer.