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Track: Inspire Session
Michael Dietze
Boston University
Boston, Massachusetts, United States
Michael Dietze
Boston University
Boston, Massachusetts, United States
Shih-Huai Cheng
Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, IL, USA
This session focuses on the design and initial results from the Ecological Forecasting Initiative’s NEON forecasting challenge. The forecasting challenge is an open competition launched in 2020 that asks participants to make predictions for ecological data being collected by the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON). It is similar to a data science challenge or model-intercomparison project except that it is a true forecast -- the validation data haven’t been collected yet at the time predictions are made. The Challenge revolves around five theme areas (Aquatic Ecosystems, Tick Populations, Ground Beetle Diversity, Vegetation Phenology, Terrestrial Ecosystem Fluxes) and the session will include talks describing the data, protocols, and initial results for each theme. We will also describe how individuals, teams, and classes can participate in the challenge, including the standards and cyberinfrastructure used. Across these forecast areas the primary scientific goals are to improve our predictive capacity in these five areas, to learn more about the patterns of predictability across different ecological processes, and determine what modeling frameworks, mechanistic processes, and statistical approaches best capture community, population, and ecosystem dynamics. Another major goal of the challenge is to create a community of practice that builds capacity for ecological forecasting by leveraging NEON data products. As such the session will also touch on outcomes of EFI’s recent forecast education and diversity workshops and the EFI Student Association’s “10 simple rules” for training yourself in an emerging field.
Presenting Author: Whitney M. Woelmer – Virginia Tech
Presenting Author: Ryan McClure – Virginia Tech
Presenting Author: Anna I. Spiers – University of Colorado
Presenting Author: Alexander R. Young – Forest and Natural Resources Management, SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry
Presenting Author: R. Quinn Thomas – Virginia Tech
Presenting Author: Carl Boettiger – University of California Berkeley
Presenting Author: Kathryn I. Wheeler – Boston University
Presenting Author: Alyssa Willson – University of Notre Dame
Presenting Author: John R. Foster – Boston University