InVEST ® Community Plugin Registry

Welcome to the Community Plugin Registry! Here you can discover plugins for the Integrated Valuation of Ecosystem Services and Tradeoffs (InVEST) software. For more information, please see the feature announcement.

Browse available plugins

A list of known community plugins can be found here. You can also use the search bar in the left column to search on keywords.

If you find a plugin you’d like to use, you can install it from the InVEST Workbench. Take a look at the Plugin Installation Docs for more details.

Note

Plugins are developed by independent organizations and developers and the Natural Capital Alliance does not take any responsibility for them. Bugs or feature requests relating to plugins that are included in the Registry must be opened in their respective bug tracking systems. A plugin’s bug tracking system can be found on the information page for that plugin.

Contribute a plugin

If you’ve created an InVEST plugin and would like to make it available to others in the community, the best way to make it discoverable is to submit it for inclusion in this registry. Take a look at the Plugin Submission Docs for a detailed guide.

Have an idea for a plugin or an existing script that you’d like to turn into one? Take a look at the Plugin Developer Docs to learn more.

What is a plugin?

Conceptually, an InVEST plugin is an ecosystem services model or performs functions related to ecosystem services modeling. A plugin could be a new stand-alone model, a variation on a model that already exists in core InVEST, or a workflow that composes multiple models to solve a domain-specific problem. A plugin could also perform pre-processing steps to prepare data for use in modeling, or post-processing steps on the outputs from another model.

Like the core InVEST models, it takes in data of various formats (usually including some geospatial data), processes that data, and produces output files that contain the results. Unlike the core models, a plugin is not “official”, i.e., not reviewed or maintained by NatCap. Plugins may be developed, used, and distributed totally independently of the natcap/invest repo and the Natural Capital Alliance.

In a technical sense, an InVEST plugin is a python package that conforms to the natcap.invest plugin API. This makes it possible to run the plugin from the InVEST workbench and the invest command line tool. The plugin can execute any arbitrary code when it runs. Commonly the ecosystem services model logic will be implemented in the python package, but it could also invoke another software tool - for example, if your model is already implemented in another language, you could develop the plugin as a python wrapper for it.

Why make a plugin?

A plugin can be run in the InVEST workbench, which provides a graphical interface where a user can enter the model inputs, run the model, watch its progress, and access the results. All the necessary information to display the model in the workbench is pulled from the plugin python package - no frontend development needed. This is handy when resources are too limited to develop a separate GUI for a project. It is a major benefit for developers to be able to focus on their model and not worry about maintaining a desktop application or distributing it across multiple operating systems.

The data validation component of InVEST is also very useful for projects that don’t have enough resources to develop this independently. The plugin API requires that data inputs are rigorously specified. Before running a model, InVEST validates that the provided data meets all of the requirements, and provides helpful feedback if it does not. This prevents a lot of trouble with invalid data.

Even if resources were unlimited, we think 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 plugin API is a useful framework in which to think of developing a model. This framework is helpful when tackling the task of turning a “model” (which may exist in the form of mathematical equations, scripts, or other software) into a well-documented, reusable, distributable software tool. Implementing the plugin API requires attention to many details that are easily overlooked when writing a basic script. Going through the process of developing a model into a plugin will help to catch bugs and identify assumptions that may exist in your math or your code.

Are you a Bot?

If so, you might be interested in our machine-readable package index files: