Incorporate parameter databases into UG?

[phargogh]

If you take a look at the InVEST download page on the NatCap website, there's a block for "Data Sources for InVEST". These are a collection of microsoft word and excel files that seem a little strange to have separate from the User's Guide. It would be nice to revisit these and see what makes sense to incorporate into the User's Guide.

@newtpatrol , would you happen to know the history of why these were distributed as separate documents and not as a part of the user's guide?

[newtpatrol]

@phargogh, I don't know that there was an explicit decision not to include them in the UG. While I didn't create these resources, I do know that they were a product of people, likely interns, making a big concerted pass through the literature a while back. This was a time when even I rarely worked on the UG because it was just so difficult, much less anyone else, so including them there probably simply wasn't considered.

Plus, we probably had high hopes of adding to them over time, which hasn't really happened. They are now old and dated and often devoid of necessary information like, say, units for the values in the tables. There are parameters in there that our models no longer use, and I'm pretty sure that the nutrient values are not in kg/ha, which is required now.

So I definitely wouldn't recommend slurping these into the User Guide as they are, and I'm tempted to suggest pulling them off the website entirely as possibly being more confusing than they're worth. I'm pretty sure that we had a similar discussion about their utility and staleness not too terribly long ago (@emlys I feel like you might have been part of that?), and I guess we ended up not changing anything. It would be a great service to the user community if we would give these a refresh, but that's a big job.