Rockstar (Robust Overdensity Calculation using K-Space Topologically Adaptive Refinement) identifies dark matter halos, substructure, and tidal features. The approach is based on adaptive hierarchical refinement of friends-of-friends groups in six phase-space dimensions and one time dimension, which allows for robust (grid-independent, shape-independent, and noise-resilient) tracking of substructure. Our method is massively parallel (up to 10^5 CPUs) and runs on the largest current simulations (>10^10 particles) with high efficiency (10 CPU hours and 60 gigabytes of memory required per billion particles analyzed). Rockstar offers significant improvement in substructure recovery as compared to several other halo finders.

Consistent Trees generates merger trees and halo catalogs which explicitly ensure consistency of halo properties (mass, position, velocity, radius) across timesteps. It has demonstrated the ability to improve both the completeness (through detecting and inserting otherwise missing halos) and purity (through detecting and removing spurious objects) of both merger trees and halo catalogs. Consistent Trees is able to robustly measure the self-consistency of halo finders and to directly measure the uncertainties in halo positions, halo velocities, and the halo mass function for a given halo finder based on consistency between snapshots in cosmological simulations.

The UniverseMachine applies simple empirical models of galaxy formation to dark matter halo merger trees. For each model, it generates an entire mock universe, which it then observes in the same way as the real Universe to calculate a likelihood function. It includes an advanced MCMC algorithm to explore the allowed parameter space of empirical models that are consistent with observations.

Comparing galaxies across redshifts via cumulative number densities is a popular way to estimate the evolution of specific galaxy populations. nd-redshift uses abundance matching in the ΛCDM paradigm to estimate the median change in number density with redshift. It also provides estimates for the 1σ range of number densities corresponding to galaxy progenitors and descendants.