Celebrating ST-Sim’s 10-year anniversary with a new logo

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 history and future.

A decade ago, we designed ST-Sim as an independent model for landscape-scale vegetation and land cover change. When we developed SyncroSim, ST-Sim became the first SyncroSim package, improving how users could create and run spatially-explicit simulations to forecast landscape change.  

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 other 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 to execute analyses such as connectivity and species distribution modeling, 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. This logo relaunch marks a new chapter in the evolution of ST-Sim as a package, and SyncroSim as a whole. To continue improving ST-Sim, we are actively working on making it a more efficient and practical tool for land managers and ecologists. Stay tuned for updates!

Finally, we want to thank our partners over the years who made the development of ST-Sim possible, including The Nature Conservancy, the United States Geological Survey, the US Forest Service, among others. As we celebrate this milestone, we also look forward to the next 10 years of innovation and collaboration!

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