Conceptual user interface for the land management system

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.