A distributed implementation of the Land-Use Change Analysis System (LUCAS) using PVM

Computer models are used in landscape ecology to simulate the effects of human land-use decisions on the environment. Many socioeconomic as well as ecological factors must be considered, requiring the integration of spatially explicit multidisciplinary data. The Land-Use Change Analysis System or LUCAS has been developed to study the effects of land-use on landscape structure in such areas as the Little Tennessee River Basin in western North Carolina and the Olympic Peninsula of Washington state. These effects include land-cover change and species habitat suitability. The map layers used by LUCAS are derived from remotely sensed images, census and ownership maps, topological maps, and output from econometric models. A public-domain geographic information system (GIS) is used to store, display and analyze these map layers. A parallel version of LUCAS (PLUCAS) was developed using the Parallel Virtual Machine (PVM) on a network of workstations giving a speedup factor of 10.77 with 20 nodes. A parallel model is necessary for simulations on larger domains or for maps with a much higher resolution.