This basic research is working toward managing urban land developements through simulation of the interaction between the natural processes and the urban land usage. Direct impacts on the landscape (for example compression of soils and damage to vegetation) can result in significant indirect impacts (for example, increased erosion, decreased habitat for sensitive species, legal complications, and decreased training land accessibility) later. If the landscape state can be captured and combined with rules which describe the interactions between and among the natural and the human components, it will be possible to test and evaluate different management schedules. This will optimize the utility of available training lands.

Modeling and simulation provide an approach for experimenting with pieces of the physical world through conceptual representations. They demonstrate the implications of assumptions about the world and have been used by ecologists in recent decades for simulating system behavior. Most of these efforts have been at the full ecosystem level. That is, ecosystems were treated as homogeneous wholes with little or no recognition of the importance of the spatial arrangements of the ecosystems' components. Recently, the disciplines of landscape ecology and biogeography have merged with the understanding that the spatial orientation of interacting ecosystem components is critical to the system modeling process, especially when the main focus of the model is a mobile component.

Each ecosystem is unique and must be modeled as such. Critical variables such as weather, soils, microclimates, keystone species, human interventions, elevation profiles, stream networks, seasonal temperature, and rainfall probabilities make every patch of landscape different. Ecological computer modelers must generate simulations from basic building blocks. For many, this has meant using a programming language such as FORTRAN, Pascal, or C. Others may utilize higher-level languages such as Lisp, Smalltalk, or Prolog. Ecological systems can even be assembled with spreadsheet software. Yet despite the uniqueness of ecosystems, the authors of this report thought the process of modeling over broad spatial areas might be standardized. One goal of their research was to establish a procedure for accurately incorporating the pertinent ecological and biological information within the model. A second goal was to demonstrate the process for interpreting the dependence of endangered species on the ecosystem and on the impacts of human activity.