Design Philosophy behind MCREW – Management/Crop Rotation Editor for WEPS

MCREW is the Management/Crop Rotation Editor for the Wind Erosion Prediction System (WEPS). It is a general purpose editor principally intended for users to create and modify files that specify the order and timing of management practices and crops grown. These files are used by WEPS when making wind erosion simulation runs. Because a management/crop rotation editor is a necessary component for many agricultural models, such as irrigation schedulers, water and air quality models, etc., developing an editor that could be easily extended and re-used among several different applications would be useful and desirable. MCREW was designed with that in mind. Although MCREW itself is not being used in other models at this time, it could easily be extended for that purpose, because of the design philosophy and decisions made during its development. Ideas implemented in the design of MCREW are enumerated, along with discussion of how they benefit development of re-useable code that can be shared among multiple applications.