As mentioned in Section 3, stochastic simulations require multiple replicates to create sufficient data for statistical analysis. These repeated simulations can be very time consuming on a single workstation if the maps are large and many scenarios are to be examined. To remedy this, a distributed version of LUCAS was created using PVM on a network of workstations. This section first discusses the details of the serial C++ implementation of LUCAS and later its evolution into a parallel version.