MCREW's principle purpose is to create/modify/construct management rotation files required for making WEPS simulation runs. Although it is an integral component of the WEPS 1.5 interface, it can be used as a stand-alone program to edit management rotation files independent of the WEPS interface and was designed to be configurable for uses outside of WEPS. Much of MCREW's functionality, behavior, and visual appearance is controlled via ASCII XML-based configuration files. Changing the appropriate configuration files allows one to specify the structure and definition of the management/crop rotation file format and control the user's ability to view and edit specific operation, and/or crop properties, etc.
MCREW is fundamentally a date-ordered list of management operations. This release of MCREW provides the user with a tabular, row-oriented view of the operations and their associated dates. In WEPS, a management operation is defined as any human-initiated process, such as a tillage event, seeding, irrigation application, etc. If the operation triggers the WEPS model to start simulating the growth of a crop (or any other plant vegetation supported with a crop database record containing the necessary vegetation growth parameters), e.g., a planting/seeding/transplanting operation, then the name of that crop is listed in the same row in the column next to the name of the operation.
Since surface roughness (both random and oriented) affects a surface's susceptibility to wind erosion, especially when little or no vegetation cover exists, it is important to represent not only the degree of roughness, but the direction it is oriented. Since many management operations have a direction associated with them, e.g., many tillage operations for example, these operations will create an oriented roughness with the direction of travel. Since this direction of travel is not known until it is associated with a particular site, the final column displayed by default in the table provides the user the option of setting that direction in the management file and is labeled Row/Ridge Dir. (Deg.).