MESH is still in the beta development stage and this documentation is not yet comprehensive. Note that because MESH combines existing InVEST models, many questions can be addressed by reading the InVEST users’ guide on the specific models you wish to run.

Latest Release Notes

MESH 0.8.5 is now released and available for download at http://naturalcapitalproject.org/mesh! Here are the new details and remaining bugs:

1. MESH now automatically incorporates a “Base Data Set,” which is a curated set of global data ready to be automatically used to create many InVEST inputs. The base data automatically downloads upon installation, but a low-bandwidth option allows users to instead point to a zipfile on their hard drive. This base data set is a small subset of what will eventually be included and currently is only sufficient to automatically generate the data to run the Carbon Storage model. The next release will contain a much-enlarged version of this base-data to enable automatic data creation for 4-5 models.
2. BUG ALERT: If you create a new project and make it all the way to batching through many runs, MESH fails to create the required folders. The easy fix is to just save and restart MESH.
3. To run the MESH model, you must manually save the InVEST parameters you want to use for each scenario. This allows you to batch-run through different runs of InVEST while varying the parameters (e.g., to do parameter uncertainty analysis). To save these parameters, click on the Save to Archivable JSON file, which is under the development drop-down menu in each InVEST model. Save this file in the scenario’s output/model_setup_runs/<model name> folder so that MESH knows what is different in each scenario. See the images below for an example.

 

 

Click “Save to Archivable JSON” in the InVEST setup  run

 

 

Save this file in the model_setup_runs folder (for either the baseline or new scenario)

 

 

Once the file is there, you can modify the input parameters via the “Update InVEST Parameters button” from the new scenario

 

 

MESH 5-Minute Tutorial

 

 

MESH Version 0.8.3 Documentation

Note that these are slightly out of date compared to the most recent release. Also note that these are literally just screenshots of a powerpoint. Expect improvements in this documentation as MESH moves towards the full 1.0 release.