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 GitHub
- The Natural Capital Project website.
Dependencies for natcap.invest are listed in requirements.txt.
Additionally, a python binding for Qt is needed to use the InVEST GUI, but is
not required for development against natcap.invest. InVEST uses the
interface library qtpy to support PyQt5 and PySide2. In our
experience, PyQt5 and PySide2 have been easiest to work with. One of
these bindings for Qt must be installed in order to use the GUI.
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.investThe latest development version of InVEST can be installed from our git source tree:
$ pip install git+https://github.com/natcap/invest@master#egg=natcap.investDependencies for developing InVEST are listed in requirements.txt and in
requirements-dev.txt. If you're running a GUI, you'll need a Qt binding
(see above) and the packages installed in requirements-gui.txt.
Participate in the NatCap forums here: http://community.naturalcapitalproject.org
Bugs may be reported at http://github.com/natcap/invest