Cobwood is a Python package designed to analyse global forest products markets. The first model programmed inside cobwood is a reimplementation of a simple forest sector model, the main value of this python package doesn’t lie in the model itself, but in the panel data structure that can be used to implement many models.
Key Features:
Panel Data Structure: The package represents international forest products market data through 2 dimensional arrays with multiple years and countries, enabling time-series and cross-sectional analysis.
Data Handling with Xarray: Cobwood utilizes Xarray datasets to efficiently manipulate multi-dimensional data structures. X array is tightly integrated with pandas. Conversion to and from pandas data frames is very straightforward. Xarray datasets are saved on disk using the NetCDF format. This format has the advantage of providing good metadata descriptors. NetCDF is a standard data format used in earth systems modelling, that will just help this model become a component of a greater modelling tool chain.