Introduction
SEALS, the Spatial Economic Allocation Landscape Simulator, is a land-use change model that downscales predictions of land-use change from aggregate (regional or coarse-gridded) inputs to a finer resolution, typically 10–300 meters.
SEALS’ primary comparative advantage is fast computation. It downscales to 300 meters globally — roughly 8.4 billion grid cells — in about an hour on a laptop. It is designed with parallelization in mind and so scales well to high-performance, cloud, or distributed computing. Performance-critical functions are written in C++ (via Cython); everything else is Python.
How to read this guide
Start at Installation and Quickstart — together they take you from nothing to a downscaled map. Then:
- Walkthrough — a guided first run, and the anatomy of a run file. Read this before you start a project of your own.
- Custom scenarios — the column reference for the scenarios CSV that defines what SEALS runs.
- MAgPIE — coupling SEALS to an external land-use model, which is also the general pattern for coupling it to any coarse projection source.
This guide is rendered both as a website and as a single PDF (download). If you are reading the PDF, links to the other two products point at the published site.
Integration with the Earth-Economy Devstack
SEALS is one of three software products maintained by NatCap TEEMs (The Earth-Economy Modellers):
| product | what it is |
|---|---|
| SEALS | this model — the downscaler |
| GTAP-InVEST | the coupled economy–ecosystem model that uses SEALS for its land-use step |
| Earth-Economy Devstack | the shared platform: hazelbean, ProjectFlow, and the conventions all three follow |
To learn about the rest of the Devstack, see its documentation at https://justinandrewjohnson.com/earth_economy_devstack/.