Session Description: Ecosystems are increasingly threatened and becoming more changeable, motivating the need for innovative management tools that anticipate this future change. Near‐term, iterative, ecological forecasts have enormous potential for providing information about future ecosystem conditions to the public, managers, and policymakers, as well as improving our understanding of ecosystem predictability.
This session will introduce the Ecological Forecasting Initiative Research Coordination Network’s (EFI-RCN) National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) Forecast Challenge, a national-scale effort to generate real-time forecasts at 34 aquatic and 47 terrestrial sites across the USA. The EFI-NEON Forecast Challenge is cultivating a community of forecasters by soliciting submissions of forecasts of near-term ecological conditions at NEON sites before data are collected. A goal of this exciting Challenge is to improve understanding of the fundamental predictability of ecological variables across spatial and temporal gradients by compiling a catalogue of forecasts across a range of forecasting methods, ecosystems, and variables, including terrestrial carbon, aquatic ecosystems, beetle communities, tick populations, and ecosystem phenology.
This workshop will provide you with all of the information and materials so that you can start submitting to the Challenge! The primary goals of the session are to 1) introduce the Challenge and forecast themes; 2) familiarize participants with Challenge documentation as well as easy-to-use software, tools, and templates that have been developed in the R programming language; and 3) and facilitate participants in submitting their own forecast to the Challenge during the workshop! We will provide an example forecasting workflow in R to follow-along and provide assistance to participants to set up their own forecasting workflow. If time permits, workflow automation will also be introduced so that you can submit a brand-new 30 day forecast every day!
The session will be of broad interest to the ESA membership, with the Challenge covering the aquatic and terrestrial biomes and community, population, and ecosystem ecology. The session is also designed to be accessible to all academic stages, from undergraduates to faculty: everyone is invited to participate in the Challenge, and the tools and templates have been developed to make it accessible for all! Ecological forecasting is a subdiscipline of ecology with rapidly growing interest, answering both fundamental and applied questions from understanding the inherent predictability of ecosystems to providing information for actionable management decisions to occur in near-real time, intersecting boundaries between scientists and end-users (public, government, managers).
