We introduced the Plugins feature in InVEST 3.16.0 and are excited to share a blog post that expands on the motivation for the feature and what we hope it will enable for the community. A snippet of the blog post is below, but you can find the full write up on our website. A few NatCap developers also sat down with Peter Hawthorne, Co-Founder of Natural Capital Insights to talk about how Plugins came to be and how Peter and team hope to take advantage. A link for that video can be found in the blog linked above or on our YouTube channel directly.
Why did we develop this feature?
Over the years, we’ve gotten many requests for new models, or variations on existing models, both from inside and outside of NatCap: “I wish [ X ] was an InVEST model” or “I want to run the InVEST coastal vulnerability model but change this one step.” The current way to change a core model or add a new core model involves a slow approval process to ensure both high-quality software and scientific credibility. It also requires a commitment to ongoing science and software support for the model. It is a major benefit for developers to be able to focus on their model, and not worry about maintaining the underlying desktop application or distributing it across multiple operating systems. With plugins, we wanted to allow scientists and developers to get the benefits of an “InVEST model” for their projects without having to go through the core model approval process. Unlike the core models, a plugin is not “official,” i.e., not reviewed or specifically maintained by NatCap.
We also believe there is value in having a shared interface for ecosystem services models. Seeing different ecosystem service models, or different versions of the same model, side-by-side in the workbench facilitates running them together and comparing them. The data validation provided by the InVEST platform is also very useful for projects that don’t have enough resources to develop this independently.
NatCap wants to encourage growth of the broader open-source and scientific community around InVEST. Plugins provide a chance for others in the community to share and test innovations in modeling and analysis without NatCap itself being a bottleneck, and a way of developing customized workflows for different use cases, again without being constrained by the limited capacity of the NatCap software team.
Please visit the website for the full blog post. We’re excited to continue the development of InVEST and the Plugins feature alongside this community!
~ NatCap Software