Currently, the impacts module (as discussed in Section 1.2) includes habitat suitability models as related to species biodiversity. A water quality impact model has also been developed for future incorporation into LUCAS. This module will facilitate studies in the impact of land-use decisions on the quality of the water supply. The user interface, of course, would be modified to reflect the addition of the water quality impact model.
Sixteen scenarios have been developed for the Little Tennessee River
Basin watershed (documented in Appendix 
). In the near
future, a
number of scenarios will be defined and developed for the Hoh and the
Dungeness watersheds in the Olympic Peninsula of northwestern Washington
state. When these scenarios are
completed they will be encorporated into LUCAS. By placing these scenario
files in the appropriate directory (see Section 3.1.4) and adhering to
the scenario file naming convention (see Section 3.1.2), these new scenario
files will be automatically included in the Scenario scrolled list
selection on the LUCAS user interface.
Future enhancements in the underlying LUCAS analysis software
include the
use of a distributed computing environment such as the Parallel
Virtual
Machine (or PVM) [BDG
91]. Currently, all of the map data used by
LUCAS is stored on a local disk of the workstation on which LUCAS
has been installed.
Another future enhancement to LUCAS is the ability
to access map data distributed across a network of workstations.
Future users may desire access to LUCAS from a PC-based environment. Utilization of LUCAS from a PC running an X-Windows emulation package is straight forward. The user in this case would access a workstation running the LUCAS software and would set the X Windows DISPLAY environment variable to the network address of the PC. Porting the LUCAS software to execute on a PC would require a Graphical Information System (such as GRASS) on the PC, the modification of the analysis software to use the GIS, and rewriting the user interface for a PC Windowing environment.