Introducing: InVEST Reports

Plus, the deadline is approaching for submitting to the Ecosystem Service Modeling session at the NatCap Symposium.

Summary

• InVEST rolls out a new Reports feature for four of its models that automatically generates visual summaries of results. Feedback welcomed!

• Share your work in a session at the NatCap Symposium: the deadline for submitting an abstract is March 4.

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I’m excited to use this space today to mention a few timely things happening in the InVEST software space. The first is the release of InVEST 3.18.0, which introduces an exciting new feature we call “Reports.” In the inaugural post in this column I mentioned that we’re always working on how to make it easier to run InVEST and incorporate ecosystem services into workflows and decisions. With that in mind, we thought a lot about what happens after someone runs an InVEST model. How does a user check the validity of their results? How many times do people re-run a model over the course of a project? What information do they ultimately want to show a colleague or decision-maker? To answer these questions, we surveyed and interviewed many InVEST users (more on this later!), which directly informed and guided the development of this new feature.

As of InVEST 3.18.0, the Carbon, Coastal Vulnerability, SDR, and NDR models generate visual summaries of results that provide maps, plots, tables, and descriptions for select inputs and outputs of a model workspace. InVEST Workbench users will see a new “view results” button upon model completion that will open the report. The report is a self-contained html file, which means it can also be shared with colleagues and viewed directly in any web browser.

We expect these reports to benefit InVEST users in several ways,

• Make it easier to quickly assess the validity of model results

• Make it clear to beginners what the primary model outputs are and how to interpret them

• Reduce some tedium for people who do lots of model iterations and need to visualize the results each time

• Provide examples of how to visualize outputs, including figures people can re-use or take inspiration from

Over the coming months we will continue to develop reports for more models. Until then, we would love to get your feedback on this new feature. We are collecting user community thoughts on the NatCap Community Forum and are excited to see examples of reports from anyone willing to share!

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Share Your Work at the Natural Capital Symposium 2026

Seeing how it’s nearly March, and a short four months to the Natural Capital Symposium 2026 I wanted to highlight that registration is open and we’re calling for abstracts for both short talks and posters! At this year’s Symposium there will be a new day-long “InVEST Contributor Track” which focuses on the software side of InVEST and the modeling community. Two of the sessions we’re really excited about will be an InVEST Plugin contributor session and an Ecosystem Service Modeling session. The InVEST Plugin session will include examples from three InVEST Plugin developers who will present on their plugin and use case. For the Ecosystem Service Modeling session, we will be reviewing submitted abstracts and inviting a few people to share their work on advancing open-source ecosystem service software and science. If you know someone (maybe it’s you!) who would like to submit an abstract for this session, please send them to the Abstract Submission Form!

We have a lot more to share coming up soon, including more details on how the Reports feature came to be. As always I hope to see you on GitHub or the NatCap Community Forum.

~ Doug