Working Groups & Chapters

EFI Chapters

Canadian Ecological Forecasting Initiative Chapter

Oceania Ecological Forecasting Initiative Chapter

European Ecological Forecasting Initiative Chapter

EFI Chapters in Development

African Ecological Forecasting Initiative

Working Groups

The Ecological Forecasting Initiative (EFI) is organized around nine cross-cutting working groups that aim to develop a broad unification of environmental biology, from core cross-disciplinary theory and social decision-making through applications of quantitative tools and cyberinfrastructure, which will then be disseminated through education and diversity and knowledge transfer. 

EFI also has an Ecological Forecasting Student Association that is open to any student interested in ecological forecasting.

Working Groups meet on a monthly basis and are open for anyone to join.  If you would like to join, send a request to eco4cast.initiative@gmail.com.

Calls for September to December 2024 are scheduled. A new schedule will be set up from January to May 2025.
  • Theory – Mondays at 11am US Eastern on September 9, October 7, November 4, and December 2
  • Translation & Actionable Science – Tuesdays at noon US Eastern on September 10, October 8, November 12, and December 10
  • Cyberinfrastructure & Methods – Thursdays at 2pm US Eastern on September 19, October 17, November 21, and December 19
  • Forecasting Standards – The Forecasting Standards working group is not meeting at this time
  • Education – Mondays at 1pm US Eastern on September 23, October 14, November 11, and December 16
  • Diversity & Inclusion – Thursdays at 11am US ET time on September 12, October 10, November 14, and December 5
  • Ecological Forecasting Students Association – Fridays at 11am US ET on September 20, October 18, November 15, and December 20

Activities and Projects

Working group activities depend on the interest of the group and who is willing to lead the activity.  Previous working group activities have ranged from writing manuscripts, hosting panel presentations, creating and compiling open educational resources, writing blog posts, compiling information about funding or matchmaking resources, creating tutorials, hosting book groups, discussing new or relevant literature, developing R code for specific forecasting related tasks, submitting forecasts to the EFI NEON Forecasting Challenge, supporting workshops, developing educational resources for the classroom or for independent learning, etc.  

Working groups also meet to provide support to one another and share difficulties or issues or invite others to help test an application or help troubleshoot. 

Working Group Project Accomplishments

One of the goals of EFI is to make resources available to the broader community.  Here are some examples of platforms used to share working group outputs. 

Theory/synthesis

Is nature predictable? Looking broadly across ecological subdisciplines, are there common patterns to what limits the predictability of different types of problems? Answering many of the deep, overarching questions in ecology requires us to develop new theory about predictability itself. It also requires synthesis across a small but rapidly growing catalog of ecological forecasts. Finally, forecasting itself is inherently synthetic, as making specific, quantitative predictions requires the fusion of our prior data and our current theories (as embedded in the models we use).  Prediction provides a means of unification by assessing our ability to extrapolate not just within individual problems but across them; it implies we understand something general about how ecological system works. These are the big-picture problems the  EFI Theory & Synthesis working group aims to tackle.
Video overview of the Theory Group.

Translation & Actionable Science

Translational ecology aims to increase the usability of knowledge and products beyond scientific communities by integrating socio-environmental knowledge and stakeholders as partners in the process and projects. Co-production is an inclusive process of knowledge production that engages partners from a range of sectors including academia, agencies, businesses, and communities.  Ideally, co-production starts at the beginning of a project, to generate questions, share system insights, and inform decision making with end products being operationalized with accelerated use.  The Translation group organically developed from the overlap in activities by the Social Science and Partners & Knowledge Transfer working groups.  These two groups merged in 2022. 

Methods & Tools

The integration of data and models is at the core of ecological forecasting. There is much that can be learned about forecasting methods from other disciplines, from weather forecasters through to economic forecasters. But ecologists also face challenges that outside the mainstream of either of these extremes, such as a high degree of process heterogeneity across many scales and an abundance of semi-mechanistic models, where physical and chemical constraints play an important role but many functional relationships are empirically derived. This working group will advance the statistical methods and tools for forecasting and data assimilation by advancing statistical approaches and best practices for data assimilation, translating these into software tools usable by ecologists, and develop uncertainty estimates on common data.
Video overview of the Methods and Cyberinfrastructure Groups

Cyberinfrastructure

Regularly rerunning forecastings using the newest data is a core aspect of iterative near-term forecasting. This sets a higher bar for repeatability and presents informatic and computational challenges that go beyond most ecological analyses, particularly for forecasts running closer to real-time. The goal of the cyberinfrastructure working group is to make it easier to implement, archive, and share automated iterative forecasts, so that any research group that can develop a forecasting model can deploy it as an automated system. Efforts of this working group include, but are not limited to, the development of standards and databases for transparent, open, and interoperable archiving and sharing or both forecasts and forecast workflows, and the development of shared community tools for data ingest/interoperability and for forecast workflow automation / continuous integration. We will make the components of our infrastructure available through open source software and open educational resources for using existing tools.
Video overview of the Cyberinfrastructure and Methods Groups

Forecasting Standards

The Ecological Forecasting Initiative is developing proposed community standards to be used for the common formatting and archiving of ecological forecasts. Such open standards are intended to promote interoperability and facilitate forecast adoption, distribution, validation, and synthesis. The initial draft standard focuses on output file formats and metadata, with additional notes on data and code repositories. The goal is also to provide suggestions for archiving code and containers.  A link to the Standards and examples can be found in the EFIstandards GitHub repository. Note that the Standards is a work in progress. If you find issues as you are applying them, contact us at eco4cast.initiative@gmail.com.

Education 

Our focus is to build a diverse community of individuals who are 1) trained on the methods, theory and decision science to create iterative near-term forecasts, or 2) trained to use the forecast predictions in management and policy. The Education and Diversity & Inclusion are separate working groups, but work closely together with a focus on building an inclusive community of practice among ecological forecasting educators and developing open, collaborative, and extensible teaching materials at the undergraduate, graduate, and professional levels. We think training in ecological forecasting is important for all ecologists, not just those actively building forecasts. For example, the approaches used to design experiments and collect data can change nontrivially if we want to inform predictions.
Video overview of the Education Group.

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

The Ecological Forecasting Initiative recognizes that a diverse community brings different expertise and experience towards ecological forecasting; we see such diversity as a benefit, and necessary to the development of a diverse and inclusive community of interest and practice.  Thus, we welcome all participants, and encourage patience and tolerance among all, holding curiosity and respect as the cornerstones of personal and professional growth. An iterative approach works not only in the process of ecological forecasting, but if we adopt a mindset to continually engage with people of different backgrounds, get input, revise our efforts, we will become a more diverse community.
Video overview of the DEI Group. 

Partners & Knowledge Transfer

The production and use of ecological forecasts often relies on partnerships between many organizations. The Partners & Knowledge Transfer working group is focused on fostering collaborations and forecast co-production among academics, government agencies, industry, NGOs, and citizen scientists. We are also interested in promoting the dissemination of ecological forecasts to help society better understand, manage, and conserve ecosystems.
Video overview of the Partners & Knowledge Transfer Group

Ecological Forecasting Initiative Student Association (EFISA)

Graduate Students meet monthly to provide a community of support for students interested in ecological forecasting. The group provides a venue for graduate students to network with others.  Activities include discussions of relevant papers, short presentations of student’s research, and developing collaborative group projects such as hackathons, software packages, educational resources, and publications.  Any graduate student interested in ecological forecasting is welcome to join. Email eco4cast.initiative@gmail.com to be added to the meeting list.
Video overview of the Student Association Group