Masters Theses

Date of Award

8-1995

Degree Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science

Major

Computer Science

Major Professor

Michael W. Berry

Committee Members

Mark Jones, Virginia Dale

Abstract

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.

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