LUCAS currently incorporates an impacts module which calculates the impact on organism biodiversity based on the land-cover maps generated by the simulation. The user must indicate the organisms on which the land cover change impact should be calculated before the simulations begin. The underlying LUCAS software generates a binary map of suitable habitat for each of the species selected, and collects statistics at each timestep which are saved to a file. Although not currently implemented, the LUCAS GUI in the future will be able to plot graphs of the species-impact maps for the user. The species that the user has chosen are passed to the underlying LUCAS software by using an environment variable. The selection policy of the species XmScrolledList is many-of-many. This is indicated to the user by square-shaped buttons for the species impact XmToggleButtons.