InVEST Contributors Welcome
NatCap Symposium reflections, InVEST contributor pathways, and the InVEST Plugin Registry
Last month at the Natural Capital Symposium, we welcomed more than 350 people from across the global natural capital community, including those specifically engaged with our software. InVEST has always been central to the Natural Capital Alliance’s ability to scale the adoption of ecosystem services and natural capital approaches over the past two decades. It’s the scaffolding that connects the science with communities and decision-makers, empowering them to visualize and quantify how different choices can lead to better outcomes. And it’s grown. InVEST has gone from four models delivered on a CD to an open-source platform of over 20 models and >20,000 downloads a year.
Before this year, we incorporated InVEST into the Symposium by focusing on teaching participants how to use InVEST or by sharing how InVEST has been applied in research and decision-making. This particular Symposium was the first time we held the InVEST Contributor Track: a series of sessions focused specifically on the development of InVEST as an open-source software and the tools and technologies the community is using to advance ecosystem services and natural capital approaches.
It was also a chance for us to share our latest developments in InVEST, like the launch of the InVEST Plugin Registry and how we’re growing InVEST as an open-source ecosystem (see the new Contributing to InVEST page). What ultimately made the new track a great success, though, was the participants who filled the room and the nine contributed talks that ranged from adapting an InVEST calibration tool into a plugin, to developing AI decision-support tools for conservation planning. See below for some of the software-specific highlights and InVEST updates we showed off at the Symposium.
The First-Ever InVEST Contributor Track
InVEST has always been a core part of the Symposium from its early days – the Symposium developed out of smaller trainings on how to use InVEST. But rarely have sessions covered the development and inner workings of the software and data that enable its application around the world. This new angle is important to opening up InVEST as a truly open-source ecosystem and allowing others outside NatCap to innovate even further with the software. We want people to be able to do more with our platform more quickly, to help address local and global challenges at the speed and scale needed!
Thus this year we designed a new series of sessions with a few goals in mind:
Provide a space for software developers and modelers to connect and share their work with one another.
Welcome the developer community to contribute to the InVEST open-source ecosystem and help steer its direction.
Offer InVEST Plugins as a way for creators to promote their work with the broader InVEST community.
We were cautiously optimistic that there would be an audience for this new track and we were blown away by the turnout and interest.
We heard from presenters working in government, non-profit organizations, and consultancies, as well as from graduate students. The talks covered a range of topics, but they shared themes around the need for higher quality data, decision-support tools for communicating results, and extending the utility of InVEST models.
The sessions were a reminder of how valuable in-person gatherings can be and how much more efficiently we can all progress when sharing our work with one another. During the breaks and in-between moments, it was heartening to hear the in-depth conversations and friendly quibbles about InVEST API (application programming interface) designs and discussions of other technologies people are using to create innovative solutions. And it was great to put faces to names and discuss ways of advancing open-source software together so we can have a greater impact. Ultimately, this is what we’re all trying to do: leverage technology to increase the adoption of ecosystem services and natural capital approaches in decision-making.
InVEST Contributor Pathways
One of the goals for the InVEST Contributor Track at the Symposium was to showcase ways people can contribute directly to InVEST. Leading up to the Symposium, we worked on clarifying these contributor pathways, developed contributor documentation, and refreshed the InVEST software landing page on our website to better guide people to the pathway that makes sense for them.
The idea of InVEST contributor pathways was motivated by work we conducted under a National Science Foundation grant last fall, where we scoped what it would take to evolve InVEST from an open-source project to an open-source ecosystem. For us, the difference between “project” and “ecosystem” is about the relationship with the community and how it thinks about InVEST. Historically InVEST has been developed and released by the Stanford NatCap software team for use by the community. Though we receive bug reports and questions from users in the NatCap Community Forum, which is a great way to contribute, it’s mostly been a one-way relationship: we receive feedback; we address it.
We want to change that mindset so the community feels welcomed and encouraged to contribute code, ideas, and issues to help develop and steer the direction of InVEST and ecosystem service software with us. Last fall, we conducted 100 user discovery interviews in which we talked to InVEST users from across disciplines and roles. A recurring theme from those conversations was all the innovative ways people were using InVEST across different use cases, from hosting InVEST on a server in support of a web application to adding parallelization to models to support global scale analysis.
In multiple cases, users were modifying and tailoring InVEST in ways that could have larger community value, but those advancements, whether bug patches or model alterations, remained siloed in their specific projects. To remove some barriers to sharing their work and innovations with the wider community, we have opened up the following contributor pathways:
NatCap Community Forum: a place for the community to lend their expertise, share development tips and workflows, and request support from the NatCap team and broader community.
InVEST Plugins and the InVEST Plugin Registry: an easy way to share new models and workflows with the ecosystem service community.
Core InVEST: create and tackle issues in the InVEST github repository or request new features to help directly steer the direction of InVEST.
Documentation: there’s no coding required to help improve the InVEST Users Guide, InVEST API documentation, or language support for InVEST.
As InVEST grows into a larger open-source ecosystem, we’re excited to work with the community to maintain and improve it. Contributions are not restricted just to code. Providing clarity and correctness to our documentation, whether it be the User Guide or API docs, is equally as important.
Many of you reading this might be saying exactly what many of our interviewees said: “but I’m not a developer!” We’ve used the word “developer” here pretty loosely, but we really mean GIS analyst, researcher, or anyone who has written workflows, models, or scripts. I also want to acknowledge that sharing code is scary. And no matter where you are as a coder, programmer, or developer, there’s always some bit of imposter syndrome. You might be thinking, “Surely they don’t want my spaghetti code.” But we do! And we mean it. I encourage you to think of sharing code for review as a learning and feedback opportunity – as a way to learn what we value as developers and maintainers of InVEST and an opportunity to improve as a coder, scripter, or programmer.
NEW: InVEST Plugin Registry
In the first session of the InVEST Contributor Track, the software team shared the latest developments in InVEST. We covered a wide array of topics including the Data Hub, InVEST Reports, InVEST Plugins, and a demo server running a cloud native API for InVEST. In case you missed it, Dave Fisher who led the development of InVEST Reports wrote a detailed post about the feature and also put together a video walkthrough.
In particular, we were excited to offer the InVEST Plugin Registry as a new way to share plugins with the community. For a refresher on InVEST Plugins you can read our introductory post or check out the developer documentation. In short, plugins extend the utility of the InVEST Workbench by allowing it to be used as an easy pathway for sharing variant versions of InVEST models, new models, or pre- and post-processing workflows. By leveraging the Workbench plugins developers get a lot of benefits including a distribution mechanism that works on Windows and MacOS, a built-in user interface, and dependency management. The Plugin Registry is an important part of growing a contributor community because it serves to get plugin authors visibility for their work and helps users discover a plugin that could fill a need.
We designed the registry using feedback from our interviews and focused on simplicity of process, documentation, and transparent plugin metadata. It was important to us that plugin authors get proper credit and recognition for their contribution by providing citation and attribution guidelines, name and contact information, and in the future ORCID iD and DOI support. Our submission process is simple, with just a few questions to answer, so that we can be as welcoming as possible while keeping the focus on advancing ecosystem service and natural capital approaches. For a complete rundown of the submission process you can have a look at the documentation here.
In the coming months we will integrate the registry into the InVEST Workbench plugin menu so that users can search and install plugins directly. With that update, we will also start displaying the number of downloads a plugin gets on the registry page. The InVEST Plugin ecosystem opens up exciting new possibilities for advancing ecosystem services science and its use. To help build up that initial catalog, we would love to help anyone interested in authoring a plugin. If you have a workflow, a model, or a tool that you think could benefit a wider audience, please reach out to us on the Forum or create an issue in the plugin registry repository.
Staying Connected
We want to keep the momentum of the Symposium going, so we have created a new space on the Forum for continued conversations about developing and contributing to the InVEST open-source ecosystem. Please consider signing up for notifications for the Contributor & Development Discussion category. This is a place to discuss contributions related to code development, documentation, or scientific advances. Use this category to,
Contribute ideas
Share development tips and workflows
Solicit feedback on ideas or development approaches
Discuss issues or challenges during development
I hope we can use the energy and value from interacting in person at the Symposium to stay connected via the Forum and our open-source projects. If you weren’t able to attend, consider this an invitation to join the conversation – and together we can keep advancing the science, software, and impact of ecosystem services and natural capital approaches.
Cover photo: James Douglass, NatCap Software Architect, in conversation with participants in the InVEST Contributor Track at the NatCap Symposium | Credit: Talia Kawaiokalani Trepte
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