LOADSS - A GIS-BASED DECISION-SUPPORT SYSTEM FOR REGIONAL ENVIRONMENTAL-PLANNING

LOADSS (Lake Okeechobee Agricultural Decision Support System) was deve loped to help address problems created by phosphorus runoff into Lake Okeechobee. It was designed to allow regional planners to alter land u ses and management practices in the Lake Okeechobee basin and then vie w the environmental and economic effects resulting from the changes. T he Lake Okeechobee basin coverage incorporates information about land uses, soil associations, weather regions, management practices, hydrol ogic features and political boundaries for approximately 0.6 million h a of land and consists of close to 7000 polygons. The system has the c apability to generate reports and maps concerning regional land attrib utes, call external hydrologic simulation models as well as display hi storical water quality and quantity sampling station data. LOADSS runs on SUN SPARC stations using the ARC/INFO GIS software and requires 80 mb of hard disk storage.