# Digital Twins Wiki Cities, infrastructure, populations and ecosystems Every entry is available as markdown at /m/.md and as JSON in /index.json. Relations are in /graph.json. ## About - [Who this is for, and what it is trying to do](/m/about/audience.md): The intended audience and the goals behind the guide, stated so that anyone can check the guide against them. - [What has changed](/m/about/changes.md): A dated record of the site, newest first. - [Contributors](/m/about/contributors.md): Who maintains the site, who has contributed, and how to be listed. - [A visual grammar for use cases](/m/about/visual-grammar.md): One symbol and one colour per domain, and whole systems drawn as relationships among them. ## Articles - [The 2026 state of the climate report: challenges and opportunities](/m/articles/2026-state-of-the-climate-report.md): Annual update of sixteen planetary vital signs by William Ripple, Christopher Wolf and colleagues in BioScience; in 2026 seven of the sixteen are at record extremes. - [Advances in geocomputation and geospatial artificial intelligence (GeoAI) for mapping](/m/articles/advances-in-geocomputation-and-geoai-for-mapping.md): 2023 editorial review by Yongze Song and colleagues of how geocomputation and GeoAI are used in mapping, with a taxonomy of mapping applications and of the data types that feed them. - [Multi-breadbasket failures, climate change, and risks for crop prices and regional consumption](/m/articles/agrimate.md): Paper by Kilian Kuhla and colleagues at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Environmental Research Letters; drives Agrimate, an agent-based model of global grain trade, with scenarios of simultaneous crop failures to estimate price spikes and regional consumption loss. - [C3S behind the scenes: making climate data visible](/m/articles/c3s-making-climate-data-visible.md): Essay by a climate data visualiser at the Copernicus Climate Change Service (ECMWF) on how the charts in its climate bulletins and reports are made, from daily variable tracking to the final graphic. - [Human-caused sea level rise drives 21st-century worldwide water level extremes](/m/articles/climate-central-extreme-water-levels.md): Paper in Science Advances led by Climate Central, by Daniel M. Gilford, Yucheng Lin, Kristina Dahl, Andrew J. Pershing, Robert E. Kopp and Benjamin H. Strauss, that estimates how much of the rise in extreme water levels at 519 tide gauges worldwide is due to human-caused sea level rise. - [Understanding Our Ocean III: Predicting the Ocean](/m/articles/copernicus-ocean-forecasting.md): Explainer from the Copernicus Marine Service on how ocean forecasts are made: observations fed into physics-based models, data assimilation, and machine learning for gap-filling, sea ice reconstruction and marine heatwave detection. - [The ecological frontier](/m/articles/ecological-frontier.md): - [The limits of reason: ecological frontiers](/m/articles/limits-of-reason.md): - [A 73% average decline in wildlife populations: an overview of the 2026 Living Planet Index report](/m/articles/living-planet-index-explained.md): Hannah Ritchie at Our World in Data explains what the 2026 Living Planet Index's headline figure measures and what it does not, and shows that about half of the studied wildlife populations are declining while the rest are stable or increasing. - [A scalable and generic framework for city-wide traffic prediction with large language model](/m/articles/llm-city-traffic-prediction.md): 2026 Nature Communications paper by Jinlei Zhang and colleagues at Beijing Jiaotong University, King's College London and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute; proposes LLM-UTP, one language-model-based model that predicts short-term traffic flow across metro, bus, bike, taxi, freeway and rail in 29 cities and areas, with code and most data released. - [Moderate global warming does not rule out extreme global climate outcomes](/m/articles/moderate-warming-extreme-outcomes.md): Nature paper by Emanuele Bevacqua, Erich Fischer, Jana Sillmann and Jakob Zscheischler that ranks CMIP6 climate models by a sector-specific impact driver and shows that at 2 °C of warming the worst-case models for floods, breadbasket droughts and forest fire weather exceed the model average at 3 °C. - [Mapping coastal forest retreat using convolutional neural networks and different satellite imagery](/m/articles/nc-coastal-forest-loss.md): 2026 PLOS One paper by Titilayo Tajudeen and colleagues at North Carolina State University that classifies Landsat and Sentinel-2 imagery with convolutional neural networks to track forest turning into ghost forest and marsh on the North Carolina coastal plain between 1985 and 2021. - [The parts of a digital twin](/m/articles/parts-of-a-twin.md): A running model of a place is four things that are built, bought and broken separately: data, an ontology, an engine, and a presentation. - [Twelve places with a question for a model](/m/articles/places-with-a-question.md): Recent reports, from a creek in Kentucky to the Strait of Hormuz, each read for the question someone there would put to a model of their place, and the kind of model that would answer it. - [So you want to make a digital twin?](/m/articles/so-you-want-to-make-a-digital-twin.md): - [Sea-level contribution from Thwaites Glacier doubles in an observation-constrained ice-sheet model](/m/articles/thwaites-glacier-issm.md): Paper in Nature Communications by Mattia Poinelli, Eric Rignot, Hélène Seroussi and colleagues that calibrates the ISSM ice-sheet model of Thwaites Glacier, West Antarctica, to observations from 1996 to 2023 and runs it forward to 2100. - [What is a digital twin?](/m/articles/what-is-a-digital-twin.md): - [Are there whole systems models yet?](/m/articles/whole-systems-models.md): - [WildCity: A Real-World City-Scale Testbed for Rendering, Simulation, and Spatial Intelligence](/m/articles/wildcity.md): 2026 paper by Xiangyu Han, Yiming Li, Chen Feng and colleagues at New York University, May Mobility, NVIDIA and Stanford that introduces a multimodal driving dataset covering six US cities, a 3D Gaussian Splatting reconstruction baseline for city-scale street scenes, and a closed-loop simulator built from the reconstructions. ## Data - [Bioregioning Earth](/m/data-sources/bioregioning-earth.md): Public knowledge base from Andrea Farias and the worker cooperative Motiu, with r3.0, that maps organizations doing bioregional and regenerative work around the world, with a shared vocabulary of themes and tags and a bibliography of sources. - [Protecting Blue Corridors](/m/data-sources/blue-corridors-bluecorridors-org.md): Web map from WWF and partners of whale migration routes built from pooled satellite telemetry, with threat and protection layers alongside; free to browse at bluecorridors.org. - [CADI, Climate-Driven Agricultural Decline Index](/m/data-sources/cadi-agricultural-decline-index.md): Global 10 km map of observed and projected change in attainable crop yields under climate change, from a team at IAE-CSIC and the Barcelona School of Economics, expressed as the number of people each grid cell could feed. - [Census APIs](/m/data-sources/census-apis.md): Demographic and socioeconomic datasets. - [Climate Reanalyzer](/m/data-sources/climate-reanalyzer.md): Climate Change Institute, University of Maine. Daily charts and day-of-year data for global and regional sea surface temperature, 2 m air temperature and sea ice extent, drawn from NOAA OISST and ECMWF ERA5. - [Copernicus Data Space](/m/data-sources/copernicus-data-space.md): Satellite observations and Earth-observation processing. - [Coralscapes and CoralscapesV2](/m/data-sources/coralscapes-coralscapesv2.md): Densely annotated underwater image datasets of Red Sea coral reefs from EPFL and partners for training segmentation models; V2 adds panoptic labels, 95 classes and fish instances, and is the training data behind DeepReefMap. - [NYC Tree Genus Map](/m/data-sources/cornell-nyc-individual-tree-map.md): Map and dataset from Cornell researchers of about 1.8 million individual tree crowns in New York City classified to genus from PlanetScope satellite imagery and airborne lidar, including trees on private land and in natural areas; published August 2026. - [CTrees 3D Fuels](/m/data-sources/ctrees-3d-fuels-model.md): Lidar-derived model from CTrees of forest fire fuels as one-metre voxels carrying canopy, ladder and ground fuel properties, demonstrated at three US sites and published as open 3D arrays for fire models to read. - [GeoExpertQueries](/m/data-sources/geoexpertqueries.md): Benchmark from Google Research of open-ended GIS analysis problems written and cross-checked by geospatial experts, used to test how well an AI agent plans an expert-level spatial analysis. - [GeoKTools](/m/data-sources/geoktools.md): Benchmark from Google Research of generated geospatial queries with known answers that require chaining one to four kinds of geospatial tool; used to test an AI agent's multi-step tool use and exact spatial computation. - [Global Nature Watch](/m/data-sources/global-nature-watch.md): Online platform from the World Resources Institute, until 2026 called Global Forest Watch, that publishes free global data, maps and alerts on forests and is widening its coverage to grasslands, farmland and trees outside forests. - [Global Safety Net v3](/m/data-sources/global-safety-net-v3-gsn3.md): Global map from One Earth and Nature Data Lab of lands and inland waters important for biodiversity, ecosystem services and climate, with land cover and conservation status, designed to be updated every year; launched September 2026 as a free web viewer. - [iNaturalist Species Observations](/m/data-sources/inaturalist-service-in-arcgis-living-atlas.md): Esri feature service in ArcGIS Living Atlas that serves iNaturalist's research-grade observations worldwide, refreshed monthly, with hexagon summaries at small scales. - [iNaturalist](/m/data-sources/inaturalist.md): Community platform where people photograph plants, animals and fungi and others identify them; the observations are published as open biodiversity data for research and conservation. - [NOAA GML Trends in CO2](/m/data-sources/noaa-gml-co2-trends.md): NOAA Global Monitoring Laboratory's record of atmospheric carbon dioxide at Mauna Loa Observatory since 1974, as daily, weekly, monthly and annual means, with a global mean series. - [NSIDC Sea Ice Index](/m/data-sources/nsidc-sea-ice-index.md): National Snow and Ice Data Center's running record of Arctic and Antarctic sea ice extent and concentration, daily and monthly, from November 1978 to the present. Version 4. - [STRATA-SCREAM](/m/data-sources/nvidia-strata-scream.md): Global storm-resolving atmosphere simulation output from the DOE E3SM project's SCREAM model, repackaged by NVIDIA as Zarr on Hugging Face for training and testing machine-learning weather and climate emulators. - [OpenStreetMap](/m/data-sources/openstreetmap-osm.md): Volunteer-built open map database of the world, covering roads, buildings, land use and places; the base layer most digital twins of places start from. - [Orcapelago](/m/data-sources/orcapelago.md): Web map of orca and other whale sightings in the Salish Sea, placed on the map from the narrative reports in Orca Network newsletters. - [Protected Planet](/m/data-sources/protected-planet.md): UNEP-WCMC's record of the world's protected areas and other effective area-based conservation measures, the World Database on Protected Areas, updated monthly from government and other submissions and downloadable from the site. - [US Energy Data](/m/data-sources/us-energy-data.md): Website from the Institute for Progress that charts US energy production, consumption, prices and grid reliability, nationally and for every state, from open government data such as the EIA. - [USGS Water Data](/m/data-sources/usgs-water-data.md): Stream, groundwater and other water observations. - [Linked OpenStreetMap, Wikidata, Wikipedia and Wikivoyage dataset](/m/data-sources/wikimedia-enterprise-openstreetmap-joined-dataset.md): Wikimedia Enterprise's open Parquet dataset joining about 17 million OpenStreetMap features to Wikidata items, Wikipedia and Wikivoyage articles, built by Michal Migurski. ## Domains - [Weather & climate](/m/domains/climate.md): Weather and climate: forecasts, reanalyses, heat, drought and the models that project them. - [Living systems](/m/domains/ecology.md): Living systems: habitats, species, reefs, forests and the models that follow them over time. - [Energy](/m/domains/energy.md): Energy: grids, generation, demand and the networks that carry it. - [Fire](/m/domains/fire.md): Fire: wildfire risk, spread and the exposure of people and places. - [Food & land](/m/domains/food.md): Food and land: farming, crops, soils, land use and what the land yields. - [Movement & logistics](/m/domains/mobility.md): Movement and logistics: traffic, transit, crowds, shipping and the networks that move people and goods. - [People & society](/m/domains/people.md): People and society: population, health, decisions and the ways people take part. - [Cities & places](/m/domains/places.md): Cities and places: buildings, streets, 3D city models and the twins of whole towns and regions. - [Sensory landscape](/m/domains/sensory.md): Sensory landscape: sound, light, air and how a place is felt. - [Water](/m/domains/water.md): Water: rivers, floods, coasts, oceans and the supply and quality of water. ## Engines - [3Dtrees.earth](/m/engines/3dtrees-earth.md): Open platform from the GeoSense group at the University of Freiburg, with GFZ and partner institutes, where researchers upload laser scans of forests, have them processed into segmented trees, inspect them in the browser and download them. - [AdaptBase](/m/engines/adaptbase-adaptbase-search.md): Knowledge graph of urban climate adaptation plans from the Urban Tech Hub at Cornell Tech; AI agents read city plans and extract actions, hazards, outcomes and costs, each traced to its source sentence. - [AIFS](/m/engines/aifs.md): ECMWF's machine-learning global weather model, run operationally beside its physics-based system since 2025; weights published openly. - [Aimsun](/m/engines/aimsun.md): Aimsun's real-time traffic management twin, Aimsun Live, uses live and historical data to simulate a road network and forecast conditions; the same company makes the Aimsun Next transport simulation software. - [AlphaEarth / Prithvi](/m/engines/alphaearth-prithvi.md): Geospatial foundation models from Google DeepMind (AlphaEarth Foundations, released as an embeddings dataset in Google Earth Engine) and from NASA with IBM (Prithvi Geospatial, open source on Hugging Face), for mapping and land-change tasks. - [ANUGA](/m/engines/anuga.md): Open-source shallow-water solver from Geoscience Australia and the Australian National University for simulating floods, tsunamis and storm surge. - [AnyLogic](/m/engines/anylogic.md): AnyLogic's simulation software combines agent-based, discrete-event and system-dynamics modelling in one model, with libraries for road traffic, pedestrians and rail and the option to place models on GIS maps. - [Aurora](/m/engines/aurora.md): Microsoft Research foundation model for the Earth system, fine-tuned for global weather, air pollution and ocean-wave forecasting; code and weights open under MIT. - [Azure Digital Twins / AWS IoT TwinMaker](/m/engines/azure-digital-twins-aws-iot-twinmaker.md): Cloud services from Microsoft (Azure Digital Twins) and Amazon (AWS IoT TwinMaker) for describing the entities and relationships in a place and connecting them to live device data. - [Bentley iTwin](/m/engines/bentley-itwin.md): Bentley Systems' iTwin Platform and its open-source iTwin.js library combine engineering, reality, GIS and IoT data into infrastructure digital twins that developers build applications on. - [Bmap](/m/engines/bmap.md): Hosted web tool from Bmap that turns a drawn bounding box anywhere on Earth into a low-poly 3D model of that place, with terrain, buildings, roads, coastline and trees from open geographic data, viewable in the browser and exportable as GLB. - [CadnaA](/m/engines/cadnaa.md): Commercial software from DataKustik GmbH in Germany that calculates, maps and assesses environmental noise from roads, railways, industry and aircraft, from a single site to a whole city. - [Circuitscape](/m/engines/circuitscape.md): Open-source program that borrows algorithms from electronic circuit theory to predict how animals, plants and genes move across a landscape, treating every possible path at once; written in Julia. - [climate_indices](/m/engines/climate-indices-climate-indices.md): Open-source Python library by James Adams that computes drought, fire and flood-potential indices such as SPI, SPEI, the Palmer family and KBDI from station or gridded precipitation and temperature. - [Climate X / UrbanFootprint](/m/engines/climate-x-urbanfootprint.md): Two commercial climate-risk platforms: Climate X's Spectra turns physical climate hazards into asset-level financial loss figures worldwide; UrbanFootprint's Resilience Insights combine hazard, community and land-use data for any location in the United States. - [CoMapeo](/m/engines/comapeo-awana-digital.md): Open-source Android app from the non-profit Awana Digital for territory monitoring and mapping, co-designed with Indigenous communities; teams record observations on a map and share them peer to peer. - [Community Fish Detector](/m/engines/community-fish-detector-cfd.md): Open single-class fish detector built by Filippo Varini and a group of contributors, trained on seventeen open datasets pooled into one; finds fish in underwater images and video from any camera or habitat. - [Cool Cities Lab](/m/engines/cool-cities-lab.md): World Resources Institute's web tool that maps heat hazard, exposure and cooling opportunity in a city and estimates how much street trees, cool roofs or shade structures would lower air temperature and thermal stress, at neighbourhood and city scale. - [CReDO](/m/engines/credo.md): Connected Places Catapult's Climate Resilience Demonstrator (CReDo) models the dependencies between energy, water, telecoms and transport networks to show how extreme weather cascades from one to another. - [DAFNI / ASU CICI and SPARC](/m/engines/dafni-asu-cici-and-sparc.md): DAFNI is a UK computing platform for national-infrastructure research; SPARC and the CICI Lab at Arizona State University, led by Wenwen Li, do GeoAI and cyberinfrastructure research for environmental and disaster applications. - [DeepReefMap](/m/engines/deepreefmap.md): Open-source pipeline from EPFL's ECEO lab that turns handheld underwater video of coral reefs into labelled 3D point clouds, orthomosaics and benthic cover statistics. - [Delft-FEWS import of Google Flood Hub forecasts](/m/engines/delft-fews-flood-hub-integration.md): Feature of Deltares' Delft-FEWS forecasting platform, from version 2026.02, that pulls Google Flood Hub river forecasts and flood status through Google's Flood Forecasting API so forecasters can compare them with their own models and observations. - [Deltares Delft3D](/m/engines/deltares-delft3d.md): Deltares' Delft3D FM Suite models water flow, transport of matter and morphology in coastal, estuarine and river environments. - [Destination Earth](/m/engines/destination-earth.md): The European Commission's Destination Earth builds digital twins of the Earth system, implemented by ECMWF with ESA and EUMETSAT, for climate change adaptation and weather-induced extremes. - [DHI](/m/engines/dhi.md): DHI's CityFlow Live Treatment Plant module (formerly TwinPlant) couples a process model of a wastewater treatment plant to live plant data for monitoring, forecasting and control. - [Digital Reefs](/m/engines/digital-reefs.md): Project hosted at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution to build digital twins of coral reefs, so that the people who manage, conserve and restore reefs can explore a reef in 3D over time and test management options; a low-fidelity prototype exists. - [DroneMegaDetector](/m/engines/dronemegadetector.md): Open object detector from the ConservationDronesAI group, built on RF-DETR, that finds people, mammals and vehicles in drone imagery for wildlife surveys and counts. - [DSSAT](/m/engines/dssat.md): DSSAT (Decision Support System for Agrotechnology Transfer) simulates crop growth, development and yield from daily weather, soil and management data, with models for over 45 crops; free to download. - [Earth Genome / Earth Index](/m/engines/earth-genome-earth-index.md): Earth Genome's hosted search tool for satellite imagery; a user labels a few known sites and it finds similar places anywhere on Earth, for detecting mines, cattle facilities, airstrips and other land change. - [Eclipse SUMO](/m/engines/eclipse-sumo.md): Open-source microscopic traffic simulator, an Eclipse Foundation project; models road vehicles, public transport, bicycles and pedestrians one by one on large networks. - [EmergentBiome Molecular Atlas](/m/engines/emergentbiome.md): Molecular atlas that links microbial genes and transcripts from wetland and coastal sediments to field measurements of methane, nitrous oxide and sulfur, as evidence for blue-carbon projects; contacts are at Ecosphere Blue, whose MethaNet product is built on it. - [En-ROADS](/m/engines/en-roads.md): Climate Interactive's global climate simulator, built with MIT Sloan and Ventana Systems; shows how choices in energy, land use and policy change emissions and temperature to 2100. - [Esri ArcGIS](/m/engines/esri-arcgis.md): Esri's commercial geographic information system; creates, manages, analyses, maps and shares spatial data, and is the geographic base of many city and infrastructure twin projects. - [Extend3D](/m/engines/extend3d.md): Research model from Seoul National University that generates a town-scale 3D scene from a single image, built on Microsoft's TRELLIS; code released with a CVPR 2026 paper. - [Extinction Explorer](/m/engines/extinction-explorer.md): Prototype web app by Hannah Nisonson of Esri's Applications Prototype Lab that links a 3D map of species observations in the San Bernardino National Forest with a 3D food-web graph, and shows what else is affected when a species is removed. - [FireVision](/m/engines/firevision-opalai.md): Wildfire risk platform from Opal AI Inc. of Marina del Rey, California, that combines imagery, lidar, GIS, weather and field data into risk rankings and mitigation recommendations for utilities, fire agencies and insurers. - [Fire Likelihood AI Model (FLAIM)](/m/engines/flaim-earthdaily-fire-likelihood-ai-model.md): EarthDaily's wildfire risk model, which combines satellite observations, daily weather and other geospatial data into ignition likelihood, fuel hazard and directional vulnerability layers, sold to insurers in the western United States. - [friGIS](/m/engines/frigis.md): Tropocen's browser-based GIS for urban heat adaptation, with a 3D model of a city district, PALM-4U microclimate simulation and a planning editor for comparing cooling measures. - [GAMA](/m/engines/gama.md): Open-source environment for building and running spatially explicit agent-based simulations; used for urban mobility, evacuation, epidemics, climate adaptation and planning. - [GCAM](/m/engines/gcam.md): Global Change Analysis Model from the Joint Global Change Research Institute; links energy, water, agriculture and land, the economy and climate in long-run global scenarios. - [Geodesignhub](/m/engines/geodesignhub.md): Geodesignhub's hosted map-based negotiation platform; groups sketch spatial proposals, bundle them into alternatives and trade them off in facilitated sessions until they agree a plan. - [Google Earth AI Geospatial Reasoning agent](/m/engines/google-earth-ai-geospatial-reasoning-agent.md): Experimental Gemini-based agent from Google Research that plans a multi-step spatial analysis, calls Earth AI models and geospatial data sources, and returns the result with its plan and sources shown. - [Google Earth AI](/m/engines/google-earth-ai.md): Google's family of geospatial AI models and agents, covering satellite imagery, weather, floods and population, reached through Google Earth, Earth Engine, BigQuery, Maps Platform and Google Cloud. - [Google Flood Hub](/m/engines/google-flood-hub.md): Free public site from Google Research with riverine flood forecasts, flood maps and water trends for river basins in over 150 countries, updated daily; the same forecasts reach Search, Maps and Android and can be pulled by API. - [OpenHydroNet](/m/engines/google-hydrological-modeling-framework-unnamed-in-export.md): Google Research's open-source hydrology framework, a Python package that replicates the LSTM river-flow models behind Flood Hub so forecasters can train or fine-tune them on their own watersheds. - [GRAL](/m/engines/gral.md): The Graz Lagrangian Model from Graz University of Technology; simulates the dispersion of pollutants and odour in built-up areas and complex terrain, including low-wind conditions and road tunnel portals. - [HELICS / FMI](/m/engines/helics-fmi.md): Two ways to connect separate simulators into one run; HELICS is an open-source co-simulation framework from US national laboratories, and FMI is the Modelica Association's standard for packaging and exchanging dynamic models. - [Hydrata](/m/engines/hydrata.md): Browser-based flood modelling platform that runs the open-source ANUGA solver in the cloud; users draw a model, run scenarios and compare the results with historic floods, free when the model is shared publicly. - [IES](/m/engines/ies.md): Integrated Environmental Solutions (Glasgow) sells building-performance software; its digital twin tools join physics-based simulation with metered data for energy, carbon and retrofit decisions, from one building to a campus or city. - [InVEST](/m/engines/invest.md): Open-source suite of ecosystem-service models from the Natural Capital Alliance at Stanford; maps and values what nature provides in terrestrial, freshwater, marine, coastal and urban settings. - [Laxmi](/m/engines/laxmi.md): AI weather model from Schmitt, Jain and co-authors that retrains ECMWF's AIFS on satellite precipitation observations to forecast rain more accurately at the local scale. - [LingBot-Map](/m/engines/lingbot-map.md): Open-source streaming 3D reconstruction model from the Robbyant team at Ant Group; turns a video or image sequence into camera poses, depth and point clouds in one feed-forward pass. - [MATSim](/m/engines/matsim.md): Open-source framework for large-scale agent-based transport simulation, maintained by its contributors and the MATSim Association; simulates every traveller's day on a road and public-transport network. - [PyTorch-Wildlife and MegaDetector](/m/engines/megadetector-pytorch-wildlife-ecosystem.md): Open-source family of wildlife detection models and tools from Microsoft's AI for Good Lab; MegaDetector finds animals, people and vehicles in camera-trap images, and PyTorch-Wildlife is the framework that runs it and its siblings for aerial and acoustic data. - [MethaNet](/m/engines/methanet.md): Ecosphere Blue's planned assessment service for blue-carbon projects, rating project performance with methane-risk projections drawn from microbial genomic evidence in mangrove sediment. - [MiroFish](/m/engines/mirofish.md): Open-source multi-agent simulation from the MiroFish team, incubated by Shanda Group; builds a population of LLM agents from a seed document such as a news report or policy draft, runs them against each other and writes a report on how the event could unfold. - [MultiSet AI Drone to VPS](/m/engines/multiset-ai-drone-mapping-and-vps.md): Hosted mapping and visual positioning service from MultiSet AI that turns one drone flight over a site into a localisation map which drones, phones, headsets and robots then query for their position. - [Mycosoft Earth Simulator](/m/engines/mycosoft-earth-simulator.md): Mycosoft's hosted 3D globe inside its NatureOS platform; it shows environmental layers, the positions of the company's field sensors, historical playback and forecast context, drawing on its MINDEX database of species and observation records. - [Neara](/m/engines/neara.md): Neara's commercial 3D model of an electricity network, built from a utility's LiDAR, imagery and GIS records; simulates loads, clearances, weather and failure risk on every pole and line. - [Niantic Spatial Places Library](/m/engines/niantic-spatial-places-library-real-to-sim-to-real.md): Catalogue from Niantic Spatial of 100 real-world environments captured as simulation-ready USDZ scenes, for training and testing robot policies in Isaac Sim and other OpenUSD simulators. - [NVIDIA Cosmos](/m/engines/nvidia-cosmos.md): NVIDIA's family of world foundation models and tools for physical AI; generates and reasons over video of the physical world for robot training, simulation and synthetic sensor data. - [NVIDIA Isaac Sim](/m/engines/nvidia-isaac-sim.md): NVIDIA's open-source robotics simulator built on Omniverse and OpenUSD; used to train, test and validate robots in physically based virtual environments and to generate synthetic training data. - [Odyssey-3](/m/engines/odyssey-3.md): World model from Odyssey that generates an interactive 3D environment from a prompt and predicts how it changes as a person or agent moves and acts in it. - [OpenFOAM](/m/engines/openfoam.md): Free, open-source computational fluid dynamics software, maintained in two lines by OpenCFD Ltd and by the OpenFOAM Foundation; used for flow, turbulence, heat and multiphase problems across engineering and science. - [OpenUSD](/m/engines/openusd-omniverse.md): Universal Scene Description, the open 3D scene format and software platform created by Pixar and now stewarded by the Alliance for OpenUSD; the scene layer under NVIDIA Omniverse and many simulation pipelines. - [MegaDetector-Overhead (OWL)](/m/engines/overhead-wildlife-locator-owl-megadetector-overhead.md): Open-source detector from the Microsoft AI for Good Lab that finds wildlife in aerial and drone survey imagery; ships the OWL model family and extends MegaDetector from camera traps to overhead views. - [Planetary Prediction Engine](/m/engines/planetary-prediction-engine.md): Part of Google Earth AI; given a user's local outcome data such as disease rates or crop yields, it picks relevant population and satellite signals and trains models for spatial prediction, downscaling and forecasting. - [Population Dynamics Foundation Model (PDFM)](/m/engines/population-dynamics-foundations-pdfm.md): Google Research geospatial foundation model that turns aggregated search trends, place busyness, maps, weather and air quality into an embedding vector per postal code or county, for predicting local health, economic and environmental indicators. - [PyPSA / PyPSA-Eur](/m/engines/pypsa-pypsa-eur.md): PyPSA is an open-source Python framework from TU Berlin for optimising power and energy systems; PyPSA-Eur is the open model of the European energy system built on it, covering electricity, transport, heating and industry. - [r.avaflow](/m/engines/r-avaflow.md): Open-source, GIS-supported simulator by Martin Mergili and Shiva P. Pudasaini for rapid mass flows such as landslides, debris flows and glacial lake outburst floods, including chains of one process feeding the next. - [Radiance](/m/engines/radiance.md): Open-source lighting simulation from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory; uses ray tracing to predict light levels and the appearance of a space before it is built, for daylight and electric light. - [Gran Chaco drone reforestation pilot](/m/engines/reforest-latam-tnc-gran-chaco-drone-restoration.md): Pilot by The Nature Conservancy Argentina and the startup ReForest Latam that seeds native trees from drones on degraded farmland in Argentina's Gran Chaco. - [Replica](/m/engines/replica.md): Replica supplies modelled travel activity for US regions and a Scenario service that re-runs its mobility model under changed population, employment or road-closure inputs for transport and regional planning. - [SPARROW](/m/engines/sparrow.md): Open-source, solar-powered edge device from Microsoft's AI for Good Lab that runs camera-trap and bioacoustic AI models on site and sends the results out by satellite or GSM, for biodiversity monitoring in remote places. - [SurfSLAM](/m/engines/surfslam.md): Real-time underwater SLAM from the University of Michigan field robotics group that fuses learned stereo depth with IMU, pressure and Doppler velocity log measurements; developed and tested on shipwreck surveys. - [Technosylva](/m/engines/technosylva.md): Technosylva makes wildfire and extreme-weather risk software for electric utilities and fire agencies, modelling fire behaviour against weather, fuels, terrain and assets. - [TimeLike](/m/engines/timelike.md): Steve Coy's simulation platform for decision-making: composable causal models of a system, run faster than real time to predict the consequences of possible courses of action and pick among them. - [UK NDTP](/m/engines/uk-ndtp.md): The UK government's National Digital Twin Programme, led by the Department for Business and Trade, develops standards, processes and tools for connected digital twins and tests them in demonstrators on the Isle of Wight. - [Urbanly CityCompass](/m/engines/urbanly-citycompass.md): Urbanly's CityCompass simulates the households, firms and developers of a region on its real parcels, month by month in a browser, to compare housing, zoning and transport scenarios. - [UrbanSim](/m/engines/urbansim.md): UrbanSim is a microsimulation land-use model from UrbanSim Inc., grown out of research led by Paul Waddell, that forecasts real-estate development, prices and household and firm location for regional transport planning. - [ACT and Vantor illegal-mining monitoring](/m/engines/vantor-act-illegal-mining-monitoring.md): The Amazon Conservation Team and the AARIMO network use Vantor satellite imagery to find and track illegal gold-mining dredges along the Puré River in the Colombian Amazon and pass the findings to enforcement agencies. - [VGGT-Ω](/m/engines/vggt.md): Feed-forward 3D vision model from Meta AI and Oxford's Visual Geometry Group that predicts camera poses, depth and point clouds from video; used as a reconstruction backend in DeepReefMap for coral reef mapping. - [VU.CITY / CLARA](/m/engines/vu-city-clara.md): VU.CITY Limited supplies 3D city models and planning tools for the built environment in UK and Irish cities and New York; CLARA Technologies simulates wind, air quality and temperature street by street from a 3D city model, live in Brussels. - [Walk Score](/m/engines/walk-score.md): A hosted service that rates the walkability of any address from 0 to 100 from the walking distance to nearby amenities and from street measures; its companions Transit Score and Bike Score rate public transport and cycling. Scores are served through a widget and an API. - [Wave Attenuation: Natural Solutions with Elkhorn Coral (WANSEC)](/m/engines/wansec.md): Caribbean project testing whether dense restored stands of elkhorn coral reduce wave energy and sediment movement along coasts, with sites in Jamaica, Barbados and Antigua & Barbuda; funded by the Caribbean Biodiversity Fund. - [WeatherNext / NVIDIA Earth-2](/m/engines/weathernext-nvidia-earth-2.md): Two AI weather-forecasting stacks: Google DeepMind's WeatherNext 3, a hosted global model that forecasts hourly and feeds Google products and cloud datasets, and NVIDIA's Earth-2, a family of open models and tools that organisations run on their own GPUs. - [Wildflow Coral](/m/engines/wildflow-coral.md): Wildflow's platform for coral reefs, where divers upload footage and get georeferenced 3D models, orthomosaics and bathymetry for tracking a reef over time, with the stated aim of a digital twin of any reef. - [World Labs / Atlas](/m/engines/world-labs-atlas.md): World Labs' Atlas is a world model that generates, reconstructs and simulates 3D scenes from text, images and video, in early access with selected partners since September 2026. - [Xylem Vue](/m/engines/xylem-vue.md): Xylem Vue is Xylem's water-utility software and analytics platform, built with Idrica, that brings SCADA, GIS, meter and other data together with applications for running drinking-water and wastewater networks. - [Yellowfin](/m/engines/yellowfin-coral-repeat-survey-workflow.md): Robotic surface vehicle from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, built by Peter Traykovski and adapted for Anne Cohen's reef work, that photographs shallow coral reefs along GPS-tagged tracks so the same colonies can be checked again after each heat wave. ## Events - [Earth, Climate, and Planetary Imagination](/m/events/leonardo-earth-climate-and-planetary-imagination.md): Call for papers from Leonardo/ISAST for a focus section of the journal Leonardo on art, science and technology work about climate, environmental justice and ecological repair; manuscripts due 15 December 2026. - [Planetary Berlin: Governing Hydrological Continuities](/m/events/planetary-berlin-governing-hydrological-continuities.md): Scenario session at the Public Vitality Camp Berlin 2026, moderated by Dark Matter Labs, BiberAmt Berlin and nextlearning e.V., on governing the Berlin–Brandenburg water system across jurisdictions using measures from Berlin's Masterplan Wasser. - [Urban Climate Futures: AI and Smart City Solutions](/m/events/urban-climate-futures-special-issue.md): Special issue call from the journal Sustainability in Smart Cities (Bon View Publishing) on AI and smart-city methods for climate mitigation, adaptation and resilience at building, neighbourhood and city scale, digital twins among the listed topics; submissions due 1 June 2027. ## Flows - [So you want to make a digital twin?](/m/flows/so-you-want-a-digital-twin.md): Five questions. Most people get off before the last one. ## Guides - [Build the smallest version](/m/guides/build-the-smallest-version.md): One place, one scenario, one output, made quickly and shown to the people who asked. Then grow it only where they push. - [Check it against what happened](/m/guides/check-it-against-what-happened.md): Run the model on a past event and compare it with what actually happened, before anyone decides on it. - [Choose the kind of model](/m/guides/choose-the-kind-of-model.md): There are a handful of kinds of model, and each answers a different shape of question. Picking the kind is most of the choice; the product comes after. - [Find the data](/m/guides/find-the-data.md): Every model of a place starts from the same few layers. Find them, check them, and write down where they came from and how old they are. - [Keep it alive](/m/guides/keep-it-alive.md): Decide whether the model should live on after the decision. If it does, it needs an owner, a data feed, a check and a budget, in writing. - [Name the question](/m/guides/name-the-question.md): Write down the one question the model must answer, who will act on the answer, and what they will do differently. - [Protect people's privacy](/m/guides/protect-people-s-privacy.md): Models of places are models of the people in them. Decide what you will not collect, aggregate the rest, and say in public what you did. - [Put it in front of its users](/m/guides/put-it-in-front-of-its-users.md): Make the output fit the meeting, the screen and the person who will use it, then watch them use it. - [Talk to the people affected](/m/guides/talk-to-the-people-affected.md): Before the model, talk to the people the decision touches. They hold the data you do not have and the questions you did not think of. ## Mandates - [Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework](/m/mandates/global-biodiversity-framework.md): The global biodiversity agreement adopted by the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity in December 2022: four goals for 2050 and twenty-three targets for 2030, which each Party committed to turn into national targets. - [30 by 30: conserve 30% of land, waters and seas by 2030](/m/mandates/thirty-by-thirty.md): Target 3 of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, adopted under the Convention on Biological Diversity: by 2030 at least 30 per cent of land, inland waters and coastal and marine areas effectively conserved through protected areas and other area-based measures. ## Media - [A Vast Machine](/m/media/a-vast-machine.md): Paul Edwards's 2010 history of how climate knowledge is made from models and data together, from early weather observation to global climate simulation. - [Agent-Based Modelling and Geographical Information Systems](/m/media/agent-based-modelling-and-geographical-information-systems.md): A practical primer from Crooks, Malleson, Manley and Heppenstall, 2019, on building agent-based models of people in places and linking them to GIS, with worked examples in NetLogo. - [Agent-Based Models of Geographical Systems](/m/media/agent-based-models-of-geographical-systems.md): Edited volume from Heppenstall, Crooks, See and Batty, 2012, collecting the foundations, methods and applications of agent-based modelling of geographic systems. - [Cities and Complexity](/m/media/cities-and-complexity.md): Michael Batty's 2005 account of modelling cities with cellular automata, agent-based models and fractals, the bottom-up methods under much of today's urban simulation. - [Digital Twin Computing for Urban Intelligence](/m/media/digital-twin-computing-for-urban-intelligence.md): Edited volume from Pourroostaei Ardakani and Cheshmehzangi, 2024, on digital twin concepts, strategies and case studies for urban planning and sustainability. - [Digital Twin Hub on YouTube](/m/media/digital-twin-hub-youtube.md): Recordings of the Gemini Call, the Digital Twin Hub's weekly stand-up, with a guest project each week; UK infrastructure and the National Digital Twin programme. - [Digital Twin Technologies and Smart Cities](/m/media/digital-twin-technologies-and-smart-cities.md): Edited volume from Farsi, Daneshkhah, Hosseinian-Far and Jahankhani, 2019, on using digital twins to monitor, diagnose and forecast city infrastructure, with attention to security. - [ECMWF on YouTube](/m/media/ecmwf-youtube.md): Talks and project videos from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, home of the Destination Earth digital twins; filtered here for twin, simulation and earth-system items. - [Geodesign, Urban Digital Twins, and Futures](/m/media/geodesign-urban-digital-twins-and-futures.md): Paul Cureton and Elliot Hartley's 2025 book on the tools now used to plan, map and design the built environment: urban digital twins, GeoBIM, collaborative geodesign, immersive environments and futures methods. - [Geomob podcast](/m/media/geomob.md): Weekly podcast from the Geomob meetup community with geo founders and practitioners; matched here for twin, 3D, city and climate episodes. - [Growing Artificial Societies](/m/media/growing-artificial-societies.md): Epstein and Axtell's 1996 Sugarscape experiments, which showed how migration, inequality, trade and conflict can grow from simple agents on a landscape; the founding book of agent-based social simulation. - [Inventing Future Cities](/m/media/inventing-future-cities.md): Michael Batty's 2018 book on why the future of cities can be invented but not predicted, and what that means for anyone who models them. - [Manual of Digital Earth](/m/media/manual-of-digital-earth.md): Open-access reference edited by Guo, Goodchild and Annoni, 2020, on the vision, technologies and uses of a digital model of the whole planet. - [The MapScaping Podcast](/m/media/mapscaping.md): Weekly geospatial podcast by Daniel O'Donohue with interviews on GIS, remote sensing and earth observation; matched here for twin, 3D, point-cloud, city and climate episodes. - [Mirror Worlds](/m/media/mirror-worlds.md): David Gelernter's 1991 book that first described software models of real places and institutions, fed by live data, that anyone could look into; the idea the digital twin of a place grows from. - [Santa Fe Institute on YouTube](/m/media/santa-fe-institute-youtube.md): Public lectures and seminars from the Santa Fe Institute on complex systems; filtered here for simulation, agent-based and scenario talks. - [Seeing Like a State](/m/media/seeing-like-a-state.md): James C. Scott's 1998 study of why large schemes to reorder nature and society from above have failed, and of the local knowledge their simplified maps leave out. - [The Flux by Epistemix](/m/media/the-flux.md): Podcast from Epistemix on agent-based modelling and what-if questions, hosted by John Cordier, with modellers from public health, archaeology and complexity science. - [The Limits to Growth](/m/media/the-limits-to-growth.md): The 1972 Club of Rome report by Meadows, Meadows, Randers and Behrens that used the World3 system-dynamics model to ask whether exponential growth in population and industry could continue on a finite planet. - [The New Science of Cities](/m/media/the-new-science-of-cities.md): Michael Batty's 2013 argument that cities are flows and networks rather than fixed artefacts, with the models that follow from treating them that way. - [The Smart Enough City](/m/media/the-smart-enough-city.md): Ben Green's 2019 argument that cities should use technology as a tool for democratic and equitable ends rather than treat it as the goal, with cases of smart-city projects gone wrong and alternatives. - [The Weather Machine](/m/media/the-weather-machine.md): Andrew Blum's 2019 account of the global system of stations, satellites, supercomputer models and institutions behind the daily weather forecast. - [Thinking in Systems](/m/media/thinking-in-systems.md): Donella Meadows's primer on systems thinking, published in 2008 from her draft manuscript, on stocks, flows, feedback and the places where a system can be changed. - [Urban Dynamics](/m/media/urban-dynamics.md): Jay Forrester's 1969 system-dynamics model of a city as feedback loops among population, housing and industry, the first computer model to simulate a whole city's life cycle. - [Urban Informatics](/m/media/urban-informatics.md): Open-access edited volume from Shi, Goodchild, Batty, Kwan and Zhang, 2021, on the data, methods and infrastructure used to sense, model and run cities. - [The WeatherPod](/m/media/weatherpod.md): Podcast of the Global Weather Enterprise Forum on the value of weather and climate information, hosted by Alan Thorpe and David Rogers; its AI series includes an episode on digital twins of the planet. - [World Dynamics](/m/media/world-dynamics.md): Jay Forrester's 1971 system-dynamics model of the world as one system of population, capital, food, resources and pollution; the model behind The Limits to Growth. ## Ontologies - [City2Graph](/m/ontologies/city2graph.md): Open-source Python library by Yuta Sato and colleagues that turns buildings, streets, transit feeds, origin–destination matrices, zones and points of interest into graphs for network analysis in NetworkX and for graph neural networks in PyTorch Geometric. - [CityJSON](/m/ontologies/cityjson.md): A JSON encoding of the OGC CityGML data model for 3D city models, with open tools to convert, validate, view and edit files; version 2.0 is an official OGC standard. - [A just world on a safe planet: Earth-system boundaries, translations, and transformations](/m/ontologies/earth-commission-safe-and-just.md): A 2024 report in The Lancet Planetary Health by Gupta and colleagues for the Earth Commission, on Earth-system boundaries, their translations and transformations. The Commission's safe and just boundaries cover Earth systems including biodiversity, land, freshwater, nutrients, climate and air pollution. - [ontology.monster](/m/ontologies/ontology-monster.md): An experiment by Anselm Hook in which a machine reads the news, finds the things each story is about, decides what kinds of things they are, and lets the vocabulary of kinds and parts grow from the text; the things on a map over time, with the source code public. - [Open Knowledge Format](/m/ontologies/open-knowledge-format.md): An open specification from Google Cloud's Data Cloud team for keeping curated knowledge as a directory of markdown files with YAML frontmatter and ordinary links between them, so that people, AI agents and other tools can read the same files without a translation layer. - [Conceptualizing Small and Medium-Sized Smart Cities in the Mediterranean Region: An Ontological Approach](/m/ontologies/smart-city-ontology-mediterranean.md): A 2019 paper in the International Journal of E-Planning Research by Panagiotopoulou, Kokla and Stratigea of the National Technical University of Athens that extends an existing smart city ontology with concepts and relationships drawn from small and medium-sized Mediterranean cities. - [Ontology Pipeline, the book: a review](/m/ontologies/the-ontology-pipeline.md): Jessica Talisman's 2026 book from Technics Publications sets out a method for building a knowledge system in six stages, from controlled vocabulary through taxonomy and thesaurus to ontology and knowledge graph, with a browser Studio and a SKOS editor beside it; read here for what it offers someone modelling a place. - [Taxonomies for structuring World–Earth models](/m/ontologies/world-earth-taxonomies.md): A 2021 paper in Earth System Dynamics by Donges and colleagues that proposes three taxa of modelled subsystems, biophysical, socio-cultural and socio-metabolic, and a scheme for classifying the interactions between them. ## Organizations - [Amazon.ia](/m/organizations/amazon-ia-amazon-ia.md): Multi-partner initiative, launching in 2026 with founding support from the Bezos Earth Fund, that combines field sensors, environmental DNA and satellite data with AI to report on biodiversity and ecosystem condition across the Amazon. - [ResiliAnce Partnership](/m/organizations/bioregional-financing-facilities-resiliance-discovery-arcs.md): Partnership of Commonland, Ashoka, The Weaving Lab and Wire Group, formed in March 2025 within the Bioregional Weaving Labs Collective, that is prototyping Bioregional Financing Facilities in three European bioregions and publishing discovery-arc papers on how such facilities should work. - [Climate Cartographics](/m/organizations/climate-cartographics.md): Not-for-profit community interest company in England and Wales that turns environmental data into maps, 3D representations and installations for partners such as councils, architects and research groups. - [Coastal Assembly](/m/organizations/coastal-assembly.md): Coastal Assembly, a public benefit company out of MIT's Self-Assembly Lab, models how sand moves along a shoreline from satellite, wave, current and seabed data, then places engineered reef structures so that waves rebuild the beach. - [Digital Twin Hub](/m/organizations/digital-twin-hub.md): Connected Places Catapult's online community for people working on connected digital twins in the UK; sign-up is needed for most of it. - [GLORIA](/m/organizations/gloria.md): Long-term monitoring network that resurveys permanent plots on European mountain summits; its 21 years of data underpin a 2026 Science study reporting rising local extinctions of alpine plants. - [LocalScale](/m/organizations/localscale.md): Public benefit organization, based in San Francisco, that connects the communities of a bioregion with regenerative-economy actors and local governments, using blockchain-based tools, a playbook, a funding hub and a seed-exchange programme. - [Open Agroecology Laboratory](/m/organizations/open-agroecology-lab.md): Argentine network of rural organizations, technicians and researchers, grown out of Cooperativa Ayllu, CEFIC and reGOSH in Mendoza, that builds open-hardware instruments and a soil-data web app so farmers can track soil health through agroecological transitions. - [SWAN Platform (Sovereign Wealth and Nature)](/m/organizations/swan-sovereign-wealth-and-nature.md): Platform from Blue Green Future and Global Resilience Partners that helps governments count living nature as part of sovereign wealth; Tonga and Panama are its first partner countries. ## Presentation - [CesiumJS](/m/presentation/cesiumjs.md): Open-source JavaScript library from Cesium for 3D globes and maps in the browser; streams 3D Tiles, terrain, imagery and time-dynamic data on a WGS84 globe. - [deck.gl](/m/presentation/deck-gl.md): GPU-powered framework for visual exploration of large datasets in the browser, built by composing layers; draws over base maps from MapLibre, Mapbox, Google Maps and ArcGIS. - [forge3d](/m/presentation/forge3d.md): Python package from the GitHub account milos-agathon that renders 3D terrain and thematic maps from elevation, raster and vector data, with a Rust and WebGPU renderer underneath; makes still images, vector files and frame sequences without a GUI. - [GeoLibre](/m/presentation/geolibre.md): Free, open-source GIS from the opengeos project that loads, styles and analyses geospatial data in a web browser, as a desktop or phone app, or inside a Jupyter notebook, keeping the data on the user's own machine. - [kepler.gl](/m/presentation/kepler-gl.md): Open-source geospatial analysis tool for large datasets that runs in a browser: load a file, add layers, filter and animate over time, without writing code. - [MapLibre](/m/presentation/maplibre.md): Open-source map libraries from the MapLibre organization: GL JS for GPU-accelerated vector-tile maps in a web page, Native for mobile, desktop and embedded apps, plus a style specification, a tile format and the Martin tile server. - [ParaView](/m/presentation/paraview.md): Open-source data analysis and visualization application from Kitware, used to look at the output of simulations from laptop to supercomputer scale. ## Use cases - [Traffic and public transport](/m/questions/after-a-closure.md): Where will traffic go when a road closes or a lane is taken, and can signals or a timetable change keep buses on time? - [Public discussion and learning](/m/questions/combining-proposals.md): What happens when several proposals or policies are combined, and how do people explore the trade-offs together? - [Crowds and evacuation](/m/questions/crowds-and-evacuation.md): How will people move through a station, a stadium or a festival, and how long would it take to clear an area in an emergency? - [Electricity and energy transitions](/m/questions/electrification.md): As heating, driving and industry move to electricity, where will the network run short, and what mix of wires, storage and generation fixes it? - [Flooding, rivers and water services](/m/questions/flooding.md): Which areas will flood, how often, and what would a change to a river, a drain or a pump do about it? - [Housing and land use](/m/questions/housing-and-land-use.md): If zoning or a transport investment changes, where will homes and jobs go, and who gains and loses? - [Ecosystems and land management](/m/questions/land-use-change.md): If land changes use, farm to housing, forest to pasture, floodplain to park, what happens to water, habitat, carbon and food? - [Sensory landscape](/m/questions/sensory-landscape.md): How do sound, light, smell and barriers shape a place for people and for the other animals that live there? - [Weather and climate](/m/questions/weather-and-climate.md): What weather is coming this week, and how will the climate of this place change over decades? - [Wildfire and exposure](/m/questions/wildfire.md): Where might a fire spread from here, what is exposed, and where would clearing, burning or hardening help most? ## Sites - [arXiv](/m/sites/arxiv.md): Preprints matching the wiki's vocabulary, from digital twins to urban, agent-based, earth-system, flood and fire models; newest first, through the arXiv API. - [CityJSON](/m/sites/cityjson.md): News from the CityJSON project, a JSON encoding of the CityGML data model for 3D city models. - [Digital Twin Consortium](/m/sites/digital-twin-consortium.md): News and publications from the Digital Twin Consortium, an industry consortium for digital twin practice. - [Digital Twin Hub](/m/sites/digital-twin-hub.md): News, events and publications from the Digital Twin Hub, a UK community site for digital twin practitioners. - [GitHub: new projects](/m/sites/github-new.md): Repositories matching the wiki's vocabulary created in the last four months with at least five stars, ordered by stars: what is new and already being used. - [GitHub: active projects](/m/sites/github.md): Repositories matching the wiki's vocabulary with at least twenty stars, not forks, not archived, most recently pushed first: the established tools as they move. - [Google News](/m/sites/google-news.md): News stories matching the wiki's vocabulary, as Google News aggregates them. - [GOV.UK news: digital twin](/m/sites/gov-uk-digital-twin.md): UK government news and communications matching “digital twin”; a loose match, filtered here by topic words. - [Hacker News](/m/sites/hacker-news.md): Stories on Hacker News matching the wiki's vocabulary, newest first, through the Algolia search API. - [Living-in.EU](/m/sites/living-in-eu.md): News from Living-in.EU, a European community of cities and regions on digital transformation, including local digital twins. - [#digitaltwin on Mastodon](/m/sites/mastodon-digitaltwin.md): Posts tagged #digitaltwin on mastodon.social. - [NVIDIA Blog: Omniverse](/m/sites/nvidia-omniverse.md): Posts on the NVIDIA blog tagged Omniverse, its platform for simulation and industrial digital twins. - [Open Geospatial Consortium](/m/sites/ogc.md): News from the OGC, the standards body for geospatial interoperability; filtered here for twin-related items. - [OpenAlex](/m/sites/openalex.md): Scholarly works matching the wiki's vocabulary, newest first, with open-access links where they exist; catches journal papers that never reach arXiv. - [r/digitaltwin](/m/sites/reddit-digitaltwin.md): The digital twin subreddit, newest submissions. - [Smart Cities Dive](/m/sites/smart-cities-dive.md): Trade news on cities and infrastructure; filtered here for twin-related items. - [3D geoinformation group, TU Delft](/m/sites/tudelft-3d-geoinformation.md): News from the 3D geoinformation research group at TU Delft: 3D city models, CityJSON and the 3D GeoInfo conference. - [weeklyOSM](/m/sites/weeklyosm.md): The weekly OpenStreetMap newsletter; filtered here for twin, simulation and 3D city items. - [Zenodo](/m/sites/zenodo.md): Datasets, software and papers deposited on Zenodo that match the wiki's vocabulary, newest first. ## Stories - [A flooded substation](/m/stories/a-flooded-substation.md): Water reaches one substation; water pumping and communications can go down with it. - [A frog chorus](/m/stories/a-frog-chorus.md): Aircraft noise changes how Pedregal frogs call and thins out their chorus. - [A late bus](/m/stories/a-late-bus.md): A live model of the roads spots a bus falling behind and helps staff change the signals ahead of it. - [Who Drinks the River?](/m/stories/computational-journalism-colorado-river-interactive.md): Scrolling story and playable water-allocation model of the Colorado River basin by Anselm Hook; readers set the flow, choose the cut rule and retire irrigation, then share the future they built as a link. ## Terminology - [Nature First: A Framework for Data Centers](/m/terms/biohabitats-nature-first-data-center-framework.md): Framework from the ecological design firm Biohabitats for asking, before a data center is designed, whether it belongs in a landscape at all, and how it relates to the watershed, habitat and community around it. - [Bioregional relationship governance](/m/terms/bioregional-relationship-governance-johar-tjoelker-kay.md): The idea that a bioregion should be organised around the relationships that sustain life in a place, such as a shared water system, rather than around a boundary drawn on a map; argued by Indy Johar and related to the rights-of-nature movement for rivers. - [Civic models](/m/terms/civic-models-simulating-the-world-direction.md): The aim of predictive models of land, water, law and policy that ordinary people can run, question and argue with, rather than tools reserved for planners, companies and agencies. - [What is a digital twin?](/m/terms/digital-twin.md): A computational representation of a real object, place or system, linked to information about its real-world counterpart. - [Natural General Intelligence](/m/terms/natural-general-intelligence-ngi.md): A proposal for a foundation model trained on observations of the Earth itself, estimating the planet's current state and simulating how it responds to intervention. - [Ontology](/m/terms/ontology.md): The set of things, kinds and relations a model admits: the decision about how to cut a continuous world into parts that can be named, counted and simulated. - [Regenerative GDP (ReGDP)](/m/terms/regenerative-gdp-regdp.md): Blue Green Future's accounting framework that counts living ecosystems as productive infrastructure in GDP and on sovereign balance sheets. - [ERA Biodiversity Crediting Protocol for Umbrella Species Stewardship](/m/terms/umbrella-species-stewardship-protocol-era.md): A biodiversity-credit protocol from Ecosystem Regeneration Associates (ERA) in Brazil that pays landholders for keeping an umbrella species and its habitat in good condition, checked by monitoring and external audit. - [Verifiable Nature Units (VNUs)](/m/terms/verifiable-nature-units-vnus.md): African Parks' unit of conservation performance, one square kilometre in which ecological integrity has been kept or improved over a year, used as the basis for outcomes-based funding. - [World System Science](/m/terms/world-system-science-wss.md): A proposed social-science counterpart to Earth System Science, set out in The Anthropocene Crisis (Cambridge University Press), edited by Mathias Albert and Barry Buzan. ## Notable twins - [3D Amsterdam](/m/twins/3d-amsterdam.md): The City of Amsterdam's browser 3D viewer of the city, which runs on Netherlands3D, an open-source Unity digital-twin framework begun for 3D Amsterdam and 3D Utrecht and now developed for the whole Netherlands. - [3D Rotterdam](/m/twins/3d-rotterdam.md): The Municipality of Rotterdam's 3D city model and browser viewer, built from its base registers, lidar and aerial photographs, covering buildings, terrain, trees, street furniture and underground cables and pipes; the data is published for anyone to use. - [Bay Layers](/m/twins/bay-layers.md): A layered portrait of San Francisco Bay that explains a digital twin as four shared geographic layers: earth and seabed, natural forces, living systems and the built world. - [Boston 3D Smart Model](/m/twins/boston-3d-smart-model.md): The City of Boston Planning Department's GIS Lab maintains a citywide 3D model of terrain, groundplan and buildings, used for planning and development review and published for download in the public domain. - [Valdrada](/m/twins/boundlessnyc.md): Mehmet Kerem Turkcan's city-scale digital twin of New York City's five boroughs, compiled from public municipal records, with real-time rendering, traffic and pedestrian simulation and a CARLA-style Python API. - [Chesapeake Assessment Scenario Tool (CAST)](/m/twins/chesapeake-cast.md): The Chesapeake Bay Program's web-based watershed model of the Chesapeake Bay, United States; a planner picks an area and management practices and it estimates the resulting nitrogen, phosphorus and sediment loads and their cost. - [European Digital Twin of the Ocean (EDITO)](/m/twins/edito.md): The European Commission's digital replica of the ocean, built and run by Mercator Ocean International and the Flanders Marine Institute; a public platform that joins Copernicus Marine and EMODnet data with ocean models and what-if scenario applications. - [eReefs](/m/twins/ereefs.md): A modelling and monitoring system for the Great Barrier Reef built by CSIRO, the Australian Institute of Marine Science, the Bureau of Meteorology and the Queensland Government with the Great Barrier Reef Foundation; it simulates water movement, sediment, waves and biogeochemistry from the catchments to the open ocean. - [Helsinki / Bologna](/m/twins/helsinki-bologna.md): The City of Helsinki publishes its 3D city models and an energy and climate atlas as open data; the Municipality of Bologna is building a digital twin as civic infrastructure with a public research consortium. - [Iliad, Digital Twins of the Ocean](/m/twins/iliad.md): A Horizon 2020 project of 56 partners that builds virtual representations of the sea from earth observation, models and digital infrastructure, and runs a marketplace where digital twins, models and their components are listed and shared. - [Moorea IDEA (Island Digital Ecosystem Avatar)](/m/twins/moorea-idea.md): A sustainability simulator of the island of Moorea, French Polynesia, led by the IDEA Consortium from the University of California's Gump South Pacific Research Station; it models links between climate, environment, biodiversity and human activity across the island and its lagoon. - [NSW Spatial Digital Twin](/m/twins/nsw-spatial-digital-twin.md): DCS Spatial Services, the New South Wales government's spatial data authority, runs a 3D and 4D visualisation platform and data-sharing portal for the state, used by agencies and councils for planning, asset management and emergency response. - [Tees Valley Traffic Digital Twin](/m/twins/tees-valley-traffic-twin.md): Tees Valley Combined Authority runs a live model of the region's roads, built on Aimsun Live, at the traffic control centre in Middlesbrough; it spots late-running buses and triggers pre-approved signal timing changes. - [Dassault / Virtual Singapore](/m/twins/virtual-singapore.md): A 3D model of Singapore built by the National Research Foundation, the Singapore Land Authority and GovTech on Dassault Systèmes' 3DEXPERIENCity platform, for planning analyses and simulations across agencies. - [3D-Stadtmodell Stadt Zürich](/m/twins/zurich-3d-city-model.md): The City of Zürich publishes its 3D city model, a roof-and-building model derived from the cadastral survey and photogrammetry, plus year-stamped LoD2 models and historical reconstructions, as open geodata with download and web services.