Hello, and welcome to the Software & Modeling column on the NatCap Substack!
I’m the software team lead at the Natural Capital Alliance (formerly the Natural Capital Project), and I’ll be the main author of this column. I get to work with 6 other talented software engineers to lead the development of our free, open-source software, including InVEST, our flagship ecosystem service application.
For those not familiar, InVEST is a geospatial software with over 20 ecosystem service models that is both available as a python package and as a desktop application for Windows and Mac. The models take in data based on a location’s ecosystems, infrastructure, economy, and people. In turn the software produces maps of ecosystem service values that allow the user to quantify nature’s benefits to people and evaluate tradeoffs between scenarios.
Of course, it’s not just the software team that contributes to InVEST and our software: we collaborate closely with our science, GIS (geographic information systems), and data management teams at Stanford and across NatCap member institutions to continuously incorporate new science and lessons learned into InVEST. Maybe most importantly, we get feedback and contributions from our amazing user community via our forum and through GitHub issues. It’s truly an ever-evolving collaborative effort. Though I’m biased, one thing that I’m grateful for is that (15 years ago!) NatCap recognized the need for a dedicated software team to help mainstream and scale science innovations by maintaining open, accessible, and replicable software for ecosystem services.
Perhaps I’ve buried the lead a bit with what you can expect from this column. For the past 15 years the NatCap software team has been working behind the scenes on InVEST and supporting our teams on research and applications. For a long time we only communicated with our community through release notes, the forum, and the feedback our team received during direct engagements on projects. It’s only been more recently that we’ve released some formal blog posts on the NatCap website to share exciting new features like the Data Hub and InVEST Plugins. But ultimately, we want to give even more of a peek behind the curtain into how we think about developing open-source software – and engage our broader community in helping us. This column will be a key place to do that, sharing lessons learned, challenges we still face, what we’re currently working on, and the larger vision we’re working toward.
Look for quarterly posts at first as we get started here, but I wouldn’t be surprised if we dropped shorter ones in between.
Speaking of where we’re headed… the Data Hub and InVEST Plugins were both recent steps toward a larger goal. While InVEST is already used in nearly every country in the world, there is a ways to go until ecosystem service approaches can routinely improve outcomes for people and nature. To get there, we want to make it as easy as possible to run InVEST and incorporate ecosystem services into workflows by minimizing the friction between data, modeling, and getting to decision-relevant insights. So we’re actively developing a family of APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) that will make it easier to discover InVEST-ready data, integrate InVEST into other applications, and shorten the last-mile gap in getting decision-ready reports.
One ethos of this effort is that we want not only the NatCap team to build off of these foundational APIs, but our community as well. Our community is using and modifying InVEST in innovative ways, whether it’s using certain models for specific applications or enhancing models to fill an adjacent need. We want to better engage our community to connect and share those advancements, providing clear pathways for contributing to InVEST directly, to help us make a better ecosystem services platform that pushes forward everyone working in this space. This leads me to the last thing I wanted to mention, in what’s turning out to be a longer first post than I intended!
At the 2026 Natural Capital Symposium (June 29-July 1 at Stanford University) we will for the first time have a dedicated “InVEST Contributor Track” where we’ll focus on the software side of InVEST and ecosystem service modeling more broadly. In this track, we’ll dive into InVEST Plugins, have community presenters (abstract submissions for short-talks are being accepted from now through March 4), and workshops to help get people started on contributing to InVEST in various ways.
This will follow InVEST training sessions covering ecosystem service assessments in general and how to run particular InVEST models. InVEST has been an open-source project for a long time. Now, we’re truly excited to move toward an open-source ecosystem, inviting others to directly or indirectly contribute to the software and science behind InVEST.
I greatly appreciate your time and hope to see you on GitHub or the Forum!
~ Doug
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