Conclusions and Future Plans

During the development of the WRAP application we learnt many lessons that will be of value in the development of future applications: breaking up the application in reusable components, integration of ArcView applications with external programs, and ways to get around ArcView limitations regarding GUI development.

The WRAP application has proven to be a valuable tool in assisting the environmental scientists with the wetland evaluation. FDOT and GeoPlan Center at University of Florida have organized a hands-on training course for the various wetland analysts from state agencies and private sector. They all evaluated the WRAP application as a useful tool in their environmental permitting activities. FDOT District Two has successfully used the WRAP application in one of their most recent projects. It is our hope and aim that many more entities such as US Army Corps of Engineers, Florida Water Management Districts and others will find the WRAP application useful and will incorporate it in their permitting activities.

Additional improvements to the WRAP application could include the following:

• Improve design of file structure on disk so as to reduce over-dependence of the program on the physical structure of the files it manipulates.
• Separate from ArcView the functions of this application that do not have a GIS component such as evaluation database, documentation, reporting, and utility tools. These functions can be construed as a stand-alone application that must also be operating system independent. This way the limits of the users of WRAP could be expanded into those groups that either use the Unix version of ArcView or do not have ArcView in their desktop. We envision this standalone part of WRAP to be called by ArcView or to be used independently when ArcView is not available. In the later case, it could be used in conjunction with free GIS viewers who are in general not customizable. Work is already underway for this last improvement, using Java programming language. We have successfully experimented with either calling this Java stand-alone application from ArcView or using it on its own.