The overarching goal of the EFI-RCN is to grow and diversify the community of practice engaged in near-term iterative ecological forecasting, with a special focus on creating forecasts with data from the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON).

The workshop format will be a mix of talks and breakout sessions focused on forecasting with NEON data, engaging partners in NEON enabled forecasts, and designing a forecasting challenge using NEON data. It will be an interactive meeting and all workshop participants should be willing to engage and participate in breakout discussions.

The talks and panel discussions will focus on the supply side of forecasting (i.e., data products), the demand side of forecasting (partners for forecasts), and lessons learned from other forecasting challenges. This workshop will provide participants with the opportunity to work together to design a forecasting challenge, similar in format to a data science competition, that stimulates ecological forecasting using NEON data products to enable intercomparison and synthesis. The workshop will focus on developing NEON forecasts for terrestrial carbon dynamics (e.g., flux tower and inventory data), water quality (e.g., temperature, dissolved oxygen, chlorophyll), and ecological populations/communities (e.g., ticks, mosquitoes, birds, community structure).  

The workshop objectives are to:

• Identify specific NEON data products to be used in the forecasting challenge.

• Present and discuss standards for archiving ecological forecasts for submission to the challenge.

• Develop a road map for a NEON forecasting challenge (evaluation, rules, partners, cyberinfrastructure needs, non-NEON data, etc.)

• Identify software, methodological, and educational needs to support the NEON Forecasting Challenge

• Identify partnerships with stakeholders and forecast end-users that can leverage NEON-enabled forecasting for decision support.

We envision the key products from the meeting will include manuscripts describing the “rules” of the forecasting challenge, including a description of the community standards, and a roadmap for forecasting using NEON data.

EFI-RCN is a part of the grassroots Ecological Forecasting Initiative. Questions? Please contact eco4cast.initiative@gmail.com.