natcap.invest 3.3.1

InVEST Ecosystem Service models

About InVEST

InVEST (Integrated Valuation of Ecosystem Services and Tradeoffs) is a family of tools for quantifying the values of natural capital in clear, credible, and practical ways. In promising a return (of societal benefits) on investments in nature, the scientific community needs to deliver knowledge and tools to quantify and forecast this return. InVEST enables decision-makers to quantify the importance of natural capital, to assess the tradeoffs associated with alternative choices, and to integrate conservation and human development.

Older versions of InVEST ran as script tools in the ArcGIS ArcToolBox environment, but have almost all been ported over to a purely open-source python environment.

InVEST is licensed under a permissive, modified BSD license.

For more information, see:

• InVEST API documentation

• InVEST on bitbucket

• The Natural Capital Project website.

Installing InVEST

Python Dependencies

Dependencies for natcap.invest are listed in requirements.txt:

Pyro4>=4.41
gdal>=1.11.2,<2.0
h5py>=2.3.0
matplotlib
natcap.versioner>=0.4.2
numpy>=1.11.0
pyamg>=2.2.1
pygeoprocessing>=0.3.0a17
rtree>=0.8.2
scipy>=0.14.0
shapely
setuptools>=8.0

Additionally, PyQt4 is required to use the invest cli, but is not required for development against natcap.invest.

Installing from Source

If you have a compiler installed and configured for your system, and dependencies installed, the easiest way to install InVEST as a python package is:

$ pip install natcap.invest

If you are working within virtual environments, there is a documented issue with namespaces in setuptools that may cause problems when importing packages within the natcap namespace. The current workaround is to use these extra pip flags:

$ pip install natcap.invest --egg --no-binary :all:

Installing the latest development version

The latest development version of InVEST can be installed from our source tree:

$ pip install hg+https://bitbucket.org/natcap/invest@develop

Usage

To run an InVEST model from the command-line, use the invest cli single entry point:

$ invest --help
usage: invest [-h] [--version] [--list] [model]

Integrated Valuation of Ecosystem Services and Tradeoffs.InVEST (Integrated
Valuation of Ecosystem Services and Tradeoffs) is a family of tools for
quantifying the values of natural capital in clear, credible, and practical
ways. In promising a return (of societal benefits) on investments in nature,
the scientific community needs to deliver knowledge and tools to quantify and
forecast this return. InVEST enables decision-makers to quantify the
importance of natural capital, to assess the tradeoffs associated with
alternative choices, and to integrate conservation and human development.
Older versions of InVEST ran as script tools in the ArcGIS ArcToolBox
environment, but have almost all been ported over to a purely open-source
python environment.

positional arguments:
  model       The model/tool to run. Use --list to show available
              models/tools. Identifiable model prefixes may also be used.

optional arguments:
  -h, --help  show this help message and exit
  --version   show program's version number and exit
  --list      List available models

To list the available models:

$ invest --list

Development

Dependencies for developing InVEST are listed in requirements.txt and in requirements-dev.txt.

Support

Participate in the NatCap forums here: http://forums.naturalcapitalproject.org

Bugs may be reported at http://bitbucket.org/natcap/invest