Exploring component-based approaches in forest landscape modeling

Abstract

Forest management issues are increasingly required to be addressed in a spatial context, which has led to the development of spatially explicit forest landscape models. The numerous processes, complex spatial interactions, and diverse applications in spatial modeling make the development of forest landscape models difficult for any single research group. New developments in component-based modeling approaches provide a viable solution. Component-based modeling breaks a monolithic model into small, interchangeable, and binary components. They have these advantages compared to the traditional modeling work: 1) developing a component is a much smaller task than developing a whole model, 2) a component can be developed using most programming languages, since the interface format is binary, and 3) new components can replace the existing ones under the same model framework; this reduces the duplication and allows the modeling community to focus resources on the common products, and to compare results. In this paper, we explore the design of a spatially explicit forest landscape model in a component-based modeling framework, based on our work on object-oriented forest landscape modeling. We examine the representation of the major components and the interactions between them. Our goal is to facilitate the use of the component-based modeling approach at the early stage of spatially explicit landscape modeling.