Today we released InVEST 3.8.0. It has been 9 months since our last official release! That means there’s lots of good stuff in this one and we strongly encourage all users to update! Here’s a glimpse:
Two new InVEST models: Urban Flood Risk Mitigation & Urban Cooling
natcap.invest is fully upgraded to Python 3.7 and Python 2.7 is no longer supported
Much improved validation of input data for all InVEST models
An improved command-line-interface to facilitate batch-processing, or for those who just prefer to do it from the terminal.
Updated sample datasets for many models
A rebuild of DelineateIt which is faster and uses Taskgraph to avoid re-computation
Important bugfixes and speedups for Coastal Vulnerability (all users should upgrade!)
A fix for a critical issue where SDR would hang or crash on MacOS
Many more bugfixes across models including SDR, Pollination, Recreation, Coastal Blue Carbon, Habitat Quality, Wave Energy, Seasonal Water Yield, NDR, HRA
Many of the improvements in this release are a direct result of conversations and bug reports that have happened on this forum! So thank you for all the support and feedback.
Yes, unfortunately the Stanford-hosted MOOC platform we were using is being shut down by the university, and so enrollment has been closed. We’re still figuring out what to do with the courses, but I believe we’re still planning on offering them somewhere. As for when the MOOC might be available again, I can’t really say other than that we’re pretty occupied with preparing for the Natural Capital Symposium at the moment and I bet the MOOC is something we’ll be dedicating some time to after the symposium.
We are working on an updated version of the MOOC. I can’t promise when it will be made available, since we’ve had several delays already, but we will let everyone know on the forum when it is.
I have recently run the Coastal Vulnerability model with one of the latest version (November 2019), that Dave particularly sent to me in this forum (InVEST_3.7.0.post576+h92e979470c93_x86_Setup.exe) and I would like to know which are the new improvements in 3.8 with respect the one I used?
Hi @Cari, since that post576 build, it looks like there were a couple small improvements and fixes that may or may not apply to your runs and shouldn’t affect the results at all.
I would like to test the different results obtained changing some of the parameters (such as e.g. protection distance, maximum fetch distance, relief radius) and I wonder if the best way to run different times the model using the same workspace is just adding a new “Results suffix” every time.
Would you recommend this?
Yes, that’s a great approach for doing multiple runs. When using the same workspace, the model will be able to re-use intermediate results (by copying files and appending the new results suffix) that already exist and only re-compute the parts that will change.