Less than a year ago, aiphoria emerged as a new tool for dynamic wood material flow assessment and visualisation that was developed in conjunction with the ForestPaths project. Since then, its developers at the European Forest Institute and VITO have been working to improve upon the original design. This all feeds into aiphoriaโs core objective of providing accessible, comprehensive and reliable data on wood and its carbon storage potential as they pertain to the EU forestry sector.
The latest update elevated aiphoria to Version 0.5 and incorporated many enhancements supporting more flexible dMFA and scenario development, including more extensive testing in stock decays. Here are the highlights:
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Based on the IPCC landfill stock decay model to estimate greenhouse gas emissions from solid waste disposal sites, particularly methane (CHโ) emissions resulting from the anaerobic decomposition of organic waste.
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Feature to bypass stock inflow for certain flows. Can be used e.g. when modeling trade flows (i.e. export). Prioritisation can be defined for either process location or for transformation stages.
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Relative flow with 100% outflow share can be used to "merge" other relative outflows by removing those flows occurring for example in the previous timestep. This can be used when dynamic modelling takes place and changes in the flow shares that occur in different timesteps.
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Feature to run multiple alternative scenarios by introducing flow variations to an initial/baseline scenario. Now running scenarios can also be turned off in the Settings file.
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Flows and stocks now track arbitrary number of user-defined indicators. The indicator value is a proportional value to the flow baseline value. Stocks are also created for the indicators.
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Scenarios can produce output as CSV files. These files contain information about process inflows and outflows, stock characteristics (stock by cohort, stock total, stock inflows, stock outflows, etc.) and scenario-related data. This makes it easier to share results and compare results between scenarios.
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User can now introduce metadata columns to the settings file that can be skipped when reading the data. This makes it easier to keep comments, metadata or some other relevant data closer to the data definition.
Data checking is now more robust and gives meaningful and easy-to-understand errors.
Some options in Sankey graphs are disabled for this version (hiding small nodes, toggling on/off virtual nodes).
You can find out more about aiphoria here. An overview of the other comparable tools employed as part of the ForestPaths project can be found on this page.
