During the quarter, Dave Hester authored a DRAFT Urban Growth and Land Use Modeling Project Plan outlining RMMC's FY00 activities. Dave Hester attended the 2^nd Annual Rocky Mountain Land Use Institute's Growth Management and Environmental Protection in the West conference held at the University of Denver Law School. Jeannette Candau, USGS-WMC, and Dave Hester began planning an Urban Growth & Land Use Modeling Workshop to be held at the University of California-Santa Barbara (UCSB). The UGLE Workshop is tentatively scheduled for January 25-28, 2000 and would actually consist of two separate meetings. January 25-26 dates would be reserved for discussing the UGLE Work Group's results obtained from executing the Deltatron 2.1 Land Cover Model (LCM) as well as the upcoming LCM 3.0 parallel processor software release. The January 27-28 dates shall be an annual review of the NSF funded UCSB/EPA/USGS land use modeling research.

UCSB released the 2.1 beta version of the LCM – Deltatron source code to the NMD Urban Dynamics Research Program. Mark Feller downloaded the November 1999 release of the LCM source code and has compiled the Deltatron 2.1 beta version on RMMC's Silicon Graphics Unix server. Modifications to the LCM 2.1 version include increasing the LULC categories from 10 to 256, increasing the slope constant value to 20 percent, and revising the relationship between the spread and breed growth control coefficients. During December, Jeannette Candau, USGS-WMC, met with Tommy Cathey, EPA – Lockheed Martin, to discuss integration of the LCM 2.1 enhancements with EPA's parallel processor version of the Deltatron model (LCM 3.0). RMMC plans to inquire with EPA about possibly becoming a LCM 3.0 beta test site.

Mark Feller began obtaining surplus RMMC PC's for developing a Beowulf PC Cluster in order to execute the Deltatron LCM in a parallel-processing environment. In preparation for developing a Beowulf PC Cluster, Mark Feller during the quarter submitted the paperwork for procuring the LINUX operating system. RMMC FY00 plans are to use four PC's in the Beowulf PC Cluster as a proof of concept for executing the LCM 3.0 parallel processor version.

Dave Hester during the quarter obtained a copy of the video “Graphics of Growth” created for the NMD Urban Dynamics Research Program. In addition, RMMC has downloaded copies of all the time-series urbanization graphics that were used in producing the Urban Dynamics video. During the quarter, Ron Matheny, EPA, distributed to the UGLE Work Group publications on Neuse River Basin (Mid-Atlantic Impact Assessment) land use modeling using EPA's Community Growth Model and the UCSB Deltatron LCM.

During the Urban Dynamics – Geographic Analysis Workshop, Dave Hester met with William Acevedo, EDC-Ames, to discuss the Mid-Atlantic 2010 and 2030 predictions generated by USGS using the Deltatron LCM 2.1 version.