Journal of Hydroinformatics 4 (2002) 99-113

Conceptual user interface for the land management system

James Westervelt and Jeffery Holland

Construction Engineering Research Laboratory, US Army Engineer Research and Development Center, US Army Corps of Engineers, 2902 Newmark Drive, P.O. Box 9005, Champaign, IL 61826-9005, USA Tel.: +1 217 352 6511 E-mail: j-westervelt@cecer.army.mil

Information Technology Laboratory, US Army Engineer Research and Development Center, US Army Corps of Engineers, 3909 Halls Ferry Road, Vicksburg, MS 39180-6199, USA Tel.: +1 601 634 2644 Fax: +1 601 634 3193 E-mail: hollanj@mail.wes.army.mil

This paper explores the conceptual user interface requirements of the Land Management System (LMS), a next-generation system designed to support the development of location-specific landscape/watershed management oriented simulation models. Currently available landscape/watershed models tend to be discipline-specific, focusing only on hydrology, ecology, social, economic or agronomic aspects of the landscape's subsystems. Feedback loops among the different subsystems tend be ignored, and this can result in long-term predictions that may not be useful. LMS will provide landscape and watershed managers with sets of software modules that can be linked together to represent and simulate unique local conditions. A design challenge of LMS is to develop a user interface that makes it possible for a watershed/landscape manager to develop and use multidisciplinary spatially explicit landscape simulation models that retain the scientific rigour of current scientist-oriented simulation models. This paper outlines a solution in response to that challenge.

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