POSE: Phase I: Evolving an Open-Source Ecosystem for the InVEST Modeling Suite for Mapping and Quantifying Values from Nature

Earth’s lands, waters, and ecosystems underpin human well-being and economic prosperity, providing a wide array of ecosystem services from food to clean water to protection from flooding. An active ecosystem service research community continues to deepen the understanding of where and how nature contributes to human well-being, alongside growing demand from governments, financial institutions, companies, and society in support of decision-making and environmental management. This project will scope and develop a plan for transitioning one of the most widely used tools for mapping and quantifying ecosystem services into a full open-source ecosystem, accelerating innovation in and the use of ecosystem services science across the public and private sectors. By engaging a broad set of users and contributors, this project will support increased partnerships among research, industry, and policy makers to develop, maintain, and use the software and the ecosystem services information it provides, for the benefit of people and nature. This project will scope the evolution of the open-source InVEST (Integrated Valuation of Ecosystem Services and Tradeoffs) suite of ecosystem service models into an open-source ecosystem with an open and engaged community of users and contributors. The project team will undertake surveys to understand the existing user and contributor community, develop guidance and onboarding materials to increase the intellectual contributor community, and organize a workshop of InVEST contributors and developers to create a plan for evolving InVEST governance and for measuring success. Through these efforts, the project team will chart a path towards an open-source ecosystem for InVEST that makes it easier and faster to incorporate ecosystem service science into research and decision-making. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.