Natural Capital Data is Now at Your Fingertips

This is the first in a new series of blog-style posts sharing software-related advances at NatCap. Stay tuned for more releases in the coming year that will make it easier and quicker for decision-makers to use natural capital data for a more sustainable and prosperous world.  

Our team here at the Stanford-based Natural Capital Project (NatCap) is excited to announce the launch of our new Natural Capital Project Data Hub, which will save users time by streamlining the data procurement process and making it easier and quicker to incorporate nature’s benefits into decision-making.

At NatCap, we have been working for the past 20 years to illuminate the value of Earth’s land, waters, and biodiversity, which support human wellbeing in nearly all dimensions of our lives. To model, map, and quantify these benefits, we have developed 22 different ecosystem service models in our free, open-source software, InVEST. InVEST has been used in nearly every country in the world and in more than 1,000 peer-reviewed publications. We have also worked directly with decision-makers in dozens of countries to incorporate these data and approaches into policy, finance, and management decisions to improve climate, food, energy, and water security as well as human livelihoods and wellbeing. 

For background on these approaches, see this two-minute animated explainer about natural capital assessment and accounting.   

Modeling typically involves a lot of redundant data searching and processing.  

In nearly all of our dozens of projects, our natural capital analyses start with procuring and processing datasets, often using the same global or regional layers, just perhaps selecting a different area: rainfall in Ecuador instead of Colombia, for example, or soils in Bangladesh instead of Myanmar. Many common data layers, particularly large global layers, are available as tiles that have to be individually downloaded and mosaiced (or combined) together before they can be used in models like InVEST. We saw our own team having to prepare the same data layers multiple times in the course of different projects, and we knew this was also a widely shared challenge. So we started collecting datasets that we use all the time at NatCap, thinking we could prep them to be used repeatedly.

In the process of collecting data layers, we also realized that our InVEST user’s guide describes many data products that are calculated from existing global datasets (e.g., AWC, or available water count data, from ISRIC, the International Soil Reference and Information Centre). Though we provide the equations to create these layers in the guide, it still requires GIS expertise, a reliable internet connection, and a fair amount of patience to create these layers. So we thought: what if we made them ourselves and provided them for all InVEST users? We worked with the data visualization and cartography studio Stamen to design a beautiful and useful interface to the Data Hub, and got going.

Model outputs and NatCap data products can be used and re-used by others too!

In addition to providing commonly used InVEST inputs, we decided it would be helpful to provide InVEST model outputs and NatCap data products. Model outputs, and other project data layers, can be used as inputs for different analyses, examples of model outputs, or informational references. An example of a NatCap data product are layers from our Ecosystem Services Footprinting Tool, which includes sample data and InVEST model results.

The Data Hub now allows everyone in the ecosystem services modeling community to access these key layers, outputs, and products, saving time and effort that is better spent engaging with decision-makers and co-producing good science. Read on for additional features of the Data Hub!

Simply providing data wasn’t enough…

Making datasets downloadable is a good start, but we thought it would be far more useful to augment the datasets themselves with information to help you find the data you are looking for. Here are more features we are building in to the Data Hub for ease and versatility of use:

• Reliable storage/serving of datasets in cloud-native formats
  • Behind the scenes, we are procuring and storing datasets with licensing terms that support redistribution.
  • We are also making every effort to offer datasets available through the Data Hub in cloud-native formats, enabling you to access only the parts of the files that you need, without downloading the entire dataset.
• Dataset Interactivity - previews, clipping and programmatic access
  • A key part of the Data Hub is that we want you to be able to take a look at the dataset before downloading some or all of it. To this end, we render colorized maps to help visualize the extent and variation of a dataset.
  • We have also built in a spatial clipping feature, so you can now easily define your area of interest and download just the portion of the data you need. This is useful for anyone who’d like to work with the layers in a GIS program or the InVEST Workbench,  but doesn’t want to download the entirety of a large global dataset,
  • For those who want to use these layers programmatically, such as from a Python script, we provide code samples of how to access each layer in python, with more languages and frameworks coming soon.
• Metadata
  • We also are building on our existing work (geometamaker, from a recent NASA grant) which makes it easier to define metadata in a file format (YAML) that is much easier to work with than the ISO-standard XML files common in the geospatial world. We have still included all required attributes from ISO-standard to ensure the metadata is thorough. All datasets on the catalog are provided with metadata.
• Search
  • Location matters, so we built spatial search into the data hub to make it easier to find data relevant to your study area. This can help you find spatial layers that cover your area of interest, as well as things like biophysical tables tuned to a specific location.
  • We have set up a tag structure of terms relevant to ecosystem services and are continuing to refine it.
  • You can search by any term you like, and the Data Hub will use it to search through the full text of the catalog, including tags, descriptions and citations.
  • For InVEST users, we make it easy to search for inputs that are relevant to and ready for use by each individual model.

Where next?

We are just getting started! We’re continuously adding more open-access datasets (email us if there are data you’d really like us to include!). These will include additional NatCap data products and InVEST outputs as well as more pre-processed inputs. We’ll also be including minor features for usability like DOIs for some layers, and better code snippets to support additional programming languages and libraries.

In the coming year, we will be integrating the Data Hub with InVEST so that the modeling software can pull your desired data in directly. The NatCap software team is also working on a number of major changes that, combined, will create the next-generation version of InVEST: a truly integrated software platform. 

Here are a few ways to get updates:

• Follow us on LinkedIn
• Join us on the InVEST Community Forum
• Sign up for Nature in Action, NatCap’s quarterly newsletter 

We are honored to support this growing community in making nature’s benefits to people more explicit and actionable, so we can all thrive on this beautiful living planet.  

James is the software architect at NatCap, and Emily is the data manager/data scientist. 

The Natural Capital Project is based out of the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability and its Woods Institute for the Environment, and the Stanford School of Humanities and Sciences’ Department of Biology. It is a global partnership of interdisciplinary researchers, professionals, and leaders: its core partners are the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, the Stockholm Resilience Centre, the University of Minnesota, Natural Capital Insights, The Nature Conservancy, and World Wildlife Fund. NatCap’s work is co-created and implemented through a network of more than 500 collaborators worldwide.