| Abstract: |
Models of land change tend to be both data-intensive and computation-intensive. For this reason, land-change models are generally and necessarily implemented with the complex computer software required to carry out millions of processing iterations over voluminous geographic rasters, over large sets of agents or geographic features, over numerous time steps, and finally over multiple Monte Carlo trials. Hydrologic models and other environmental and ecosystem models are also implemented with computer software because they often require massively repetitive computation and processing over numerous elements of time and space. Thus the problems of integrating or coupling land-change models with related environmental-resource models include the problems of model integration at the software level, and cannot be fully understood, nor solved, without due consideration of the constraints and possibilities of model integration in software. The methods, materials, tools, and concerns of the coupling and integration of land-change models with environmental-resource models will be surveyed and discussed from the perspective of the software developer. The discussion will distinguish coupling from integration and will cover modeling languages and frameworks, operating environments, inter-system and inter-process communication, points of contact among models, software-development costs and constraints, design trade-offs, and computational efficiency. |
