GIS Based Environmental Municipal Plan Design

Dear everyone, i am currently developing a landscape-environmental strategic plan for several municipalities in Italy in GIS. The plan carefully delineates a series of spaces for depaving and the reintroduction of nature in public spaces as well as the restoration and valorization of green open spaces (from fields to forest etc…). I would like to know how can i assess the plan with the InVEST tool or how can i potentially develop a project framework for the next similar commission in a way that i can easily assess the potentialities of the plan in terms of nature restoration. In other words what is the interoperability that is possible ? thanks, Filippo

Hi @lafleurf , thanks for joining the community and describing your project.

It sounds like you might be interested in evaluating the impact of greenspaces in urban environments. A few InVEST models might be of interest to you,

  • Urban Cooling
  • Urban Nature Access
  • Urban Stormwater Retention
  • Urban Flood Risk Mitigation

You can read up on all of these in the User’s Guide: InVEST® User Guide — InVEST® documentation

In general, if you can create landuse/landcover rasters to represent your different restoration scenarios, and the baseline conditions, then these models can estimate effects of the changes.

If this is an analysis you want to repeat again in the future, then you might want to consider developing a reproducible workflow that uses scripts to prepare your GIS data, run the InVEST models, and summarize results. InVEST has a Python API that can be useful in this case. InVEST: Integrated Valuation of Ecosystem Services and Tradeoffs — InVEST 3.14.2.post1+g1c98e3a.d20240530 documentation