[Coral-List] Visual HEA version 2.6

[Matt Johnston]

The National Coral Reef Institute at the Nova Southeastern University
Oceanographic Center announces the release of Visual HEA version 2.6. 

Habitat Equivalency Analysis (HEA) is a means to determine the amount of
compensatory restoration required to provide services that are equivalent to
the interim loss of natural resource services following injury. Visual HEA
is a program that provides an efficient method of calculating the required
compensation. The program accepts input of parameters necessary to determine
long-term service loss from the injury (injured area size and degree; times
of injury, functional shape, and equilibrium; post-injury recovery);
parameters to determine long-term service gain from compensatory restoration
actions (times of restoration beginning and equilibrium; maximum service
level; service gain function shape); and general program parameters
(relative value of lost and gained services, baseline level of lost and
gained services, discount rate).

Version 2.6 includes the following major enhancements and bug fixes:
- Discount rate precision has been increased to 3 decimal places 
- Output to a .pdf file has been added, and the postscript output has been
discontinued 
- An error in the calculation of quarterly SAY's gained has been fixed 
- An error in calculating quarterly % services lost has been corrected 
- A correction was made to calculate the entire last year when calculating
quarterly gains 
- Pre-injury and pre-service level decimal precision has been increased to 2
decimal places 
- The ability to manually configure quarterly nodes has been added 
 
In a collaborative effort with the University of Montpellier, a full French
translation is also available. To comply with the Environmental Liability
Law of 2006 and via the European Directive of 2008, the French government
has recommended Visual HEA serve as the de facto standard software to be
used when conducting habitat equivalency analysis.  For the  French version
the default discount rate has been set at 4% (the European standard) 

The Visual HEA program is being made available free of charge to interested
researchers affiliated with scientific institutions, and is provided for
non-commercial use only. Both the French and English version of Visual HEA
2.6 are available from the following website:
http://www.nova.edu/ocean/visual_hea/

 

___________________________________

Matt Johnston      

Software Developer/Researcher

National Coral Reef Institute

Nova Southeastern University Oceanographic Center

8000 N. Ocean Drive, Dania, FL 33004 USA

 <mailto:johnmatt at nova.edu> johnmatt at nova.edu

954.262.3641 (office, CoE #506)

954.205.8007 (cell)

 <http://www.nova.edu/~johnmatt> www.nova.edu/~johnmatt