Predicting Off-Road Army Training Impacts with the Aid of ArcInfo Open Development Environment (ODE)

Author: William D. Meyer
Organization: U.S. Army Engineering Research Center/Construction Engineering Research Laboratory

USAERDC
P.O. Box 9005
Champaign, IL 61826-9005
USA

Phone: 217-352-6511
Fax: 217-373-7251
W-Meyer@cecer.army.mil

To assist in the prediction of vegetation and soil impacts during Army training exercises, a model was developed at the U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center's Construction Engineering Research Laboratory. The Training Use Distribution Model (TUDM) predicts the spatial distribution and intensity of off-road maneuver miles. The implementation of the model required a user interface and processing architecture built in Visual Basic to interact with a GIS capable of grid analysis. Esri's ArcInfo Open Development Environment (ODE) GIS provided the perfect match for this need.