Blog post

ST-Sim turns 10 years old

ST-Sim

ST-Sim, the open-source SyncroSim package for modeling landscape change, is turning 10 years old. To mark this special date, we took a moment to reflect on its journey over the years.

A decade ago, ST-Sim was as an independent model for landscape-scale vegetation and land cover change. After the development of SyncroSim, ST-Sim became the first SyncroSim package, improving how users could create and run spatially-explicit simulations to forecast landscape change. Its development was made possible thanks to support from partners such as The Nature Conservancy, the United States Geological Survey, and the US Forest Service, among others.

Today, ST-Sim has evolved into a versatile tool that can help answer a wide range of landscape management questions, while accounting for uncertainty in model projections. Beyond landscape change, the package now includes methods for carbon accounting and measuring continuous state variables through stock-flow models. As a result, ST-Sim has been used in research projects across diverse ecosystems, ranging from forests to coral reefs. Now, ST-Sim can also be used in conjunction with other SyncroSim packages, such as Omniscape and WISDM, extending its application for other land management and conservation purposes.

To celebrate this milestone, we are excited to unveil a brand-new ST-Sim logo. As the first SyncroSim package, ST-Sim’s original logo was designed upon the quintessential SyncroSim “S”, customized with a square chain to represent the state-and-transition aspect of the tool. As SyncroSim’s suite of packages has expanded, the new logo is intended to differentiate ST-Sim from the SyncroSim branding, while emphasizing the state-and-transition nature of the package. The stacked tiles are inspired by states, transitions and rasters, while the leaf variations symbolize the ecological changes in an ecosystem of choice.

To learn more about ST-Sim, visit our package documentation page at https://docs.stsim.net/.