Contributors to the RC have been prolific in developing and vetting the science and theoretical underpinnings essential to understanding and explaining how riverscapes work and are organized across a range of nested hierarchical spatial scales. We have also committed to building open-source algorithms tools to make it easier for researchers, professionals, practitioners, and students to apply those concepts to their riverscapes and disseminate FAIR tools and outputs from those tools.

Riverscapes Compliant

Tools are designated as "riverscapes-compliant" when they meet the following criteria:

• Tool Status of Operational-Grade or Higher
• Code produces riverscapes projects as output of all analyses
• Project Type is registered with program.xml in Program Repo
• Source-Code is open-source and FAIR
• Has been vetted by the RS Science Committee (i.e. has a "Report Card")

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Riverscapes Compliant Tools

All tools ranked as RC-Compliant are based on peer-reviewed methods and have been additionally vetted by our RS Science Committee. When RC developers have developed new methods themselves, the RC encourages peer vetting, publication, and dissemination in the peer-reviewed literature. The RC also makes sure to have a well-documented website (typically with a URL that will take the form of sometool.riverscapes.net). For most users, the online help documentation and using the tool 'as is' is as far as they need to take it. However, for those so inclined, all of the underlying source-code for these tools, models, and algorithms are available in their GitHub repository at github.com/Riverscapes. Note that the tools.riverscapes.net/sometool convention is used for our predominantly production-grade tools that share the Riverscapes Commons Library.

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Tools Pending Riverscapes Compliance

Tools are designated as "pending riverscapes-compliance" when the RS Science Committee has accepted the tool for consideration and they meet the following criteria:

• Tool Status of Resarch-Grade or higher
• Developer has indicated intent to modify code to produce riverscapes projects as output of all analyses - Moving up to Operational-Grade
• Developer has indicated intent to add Project Type registration with program.xml in Program Repo

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Model Discrimination

We discriminate our tools based on their interface and tool grade.

Tool Grade

We classify the grade of our tools according to their growth from innovative research ideas, through to operational tools in development that (with a little love and patience) can be run by someone other than the developer, on through to more broadly deployable professional tools that are robust and usable by any user in very different settings.