Introduction

New EFI paper and Press Release!	See the press release at: https://ecoforecast.org/ncc2024/ for the new EFI paper, “Near-term Ecological Forecasting for Climate Change Action” in the journal Nature Climate Change. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-024-02182-0 Ecological forecasts can be used to predict changes in ecosystems and subsequent impacts on communities. There is a need for forecasts in shorter-term decision-making time periods of weeks and months which calls for greater investments in building the capacity to improve the field and for world nations, major corporations, and NGOs to integrate ecological forecasting into their climate adaptation and mitigation strategies.
Ecological Forecasting Initiative 2025 Conference, May 19-22, 2025	We are now accepting submissions! Submissions for Abstracts, Workshops, and Working Group activities, Travel scholarship applications, and requests for visa support letters are now open. The deadline for the submissions and applications is January 22, 2025. We are looking forward to convening the EFI community at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia! Individuals are invited from academia, government agencies, industry and the non-profit sectors to come together in person to share cutting-edge research and applications in ecological forecasting broadly. There will be four days with keynote addresses, short research presentations and panel discussions, a poster session, working group activities, training workshops, open time for networking, and a field trip into the mountains. Conference details and links for submissions and applications are available at https://bit.ly/efi2025
AGU Special Collection Call for Papers	This special collection focuses on the emerging field of ecological forecasting, which involves predicting the future states of ecosystems. The issue welcomes contributions that use novel methodologies, interdisciplinary approaches, real-time data integration, and multi-forecast synthesis to enhance the accuracy, uncertainty representation, applicability, and equality of ecological forecasts. Accepted submissions to the following journals will be included in the special collection. Journal of Geophysical Research: Biogeosciences; Journal of Geophysical Research: Machine Learning and Computation; Water Resources Research; Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems. Submission deadline: October 31, 2026
	Registration is now open for the fourth round of the Statistical Methods Webinar series co-hosted by EFI and the ESA Statistical Ecology Section! On January 6 Dr. Ben Weinstein (University of Florida) presented on "The DeepForest python package and Deep Learning for Airborne Biodiversity Monitoring". DeepForest is a python package for airborne object detection. It allows users to train and fine-tune object detection models in only a few lines of code. It comes with several prebuilt models, including tree detection, bird detection and cattle detection, that serve as backbones for fine tuning to new datasets and taxa. Dr. Weinstein walked through training, evaluating deepforest models, as well as best practices for one-source machine learning projects in ecology. A recording from this presentation will be available by Monday, January 13. The recording on stopped random walks from the December 2024 seminar is now available at: https://youtu.be/uC6j7F8MoQg Recordings and resources from all the webinars are available on the Statistical Methods Seminar webpage . Each seminar is 1.5 hour in length and is led by an invited speaker with expertise on a given topic or statistical method. Speakers spend the first part of the webinar presenting a project where they used the method, followed by sharing R or Python code or related packages used for the statistical method. Presenters walk through the code, taking time to describe common pitfalls or stumbling blocks for performing the method and visualizing results.
European EFI Chapter Monthly Seminars	The European EFI Chapter (EEFI) monthly seminars series is scheduled from now to May 2025 and is available on the EEFI Seminars webpage! The next seminar will be on 12th February 2025 at 1pm CET by Viktoriia Radchuk (Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research). Viktoriia's title and abstract are forthcoming. Add the seminar to your calendar with this link. The recording from the 8th January call by Nigel Yoccoz on "The Climate-Ecological Observatory for Arctic Tundra (COAT)as a platform for short-term ecological forecasting"is now available at https://youtu.be/t5gCEMUw-S4 Find other recordings and details on the EEFI Seminars webpage.
Oceania EFI Chapter Monthly Seminars	The Oceania EFI Chapter (OEFI) wrapped up their seminars for 2024! Recordings from the calls are available at https://ecoforecast.org/oceania-ecological-forecasting-initiative/
2024 Social Science and Ecoforecasting Planning Award	Congratulations to the five teams that were awarded the Social Science and Ecoforecasting Planning Award! The Review Committee was thrilled to see the interest in this inaugural round of the award and the diversity of quality project topics submitted and social science backgrounds represented. Find information about the project leads, group members, and project descriptions HERE.
Forecasting Challenges	There are now three Forecasting Challenges available for anyone to participate and submit forecasts to. 1) EFI NEON Ecological Forecast Challenge. Target data for: aquatic ecosystems, terrestrial carbon and water fluxes, tick populations, beetle communities, and phenology. 2) EFI-USGS River Chlorophyll Forecasting Challenge. Target data for: river chlorophyll a 3) Virginia Ecoforecast Reservoir Analysis (VERA) Forecasting Challenge. Target data for: 3 physical variables, 5 chemical variables, 2 biological variables and a range of additional variables that can be used for forecasting but that are not part of the focal variables evaluated with the VERA Challenge
	The EFI-NEON Research Coordination Network is an NSF-funded grant to create a community of practice that builds capacity for ecological forecasting by leveraging NEON data products. Forecast challenges can be used for classroom instruction or the cyberinfrastructure is now set up to support stand-alone Forecasting Challenges that allow people to submit forecasts that are checked for alignment with the metadata standards, scored, cataloged, and visualized on a dashboard for non-NEON data streams. Email info@ecoforecast.org if you want more information about using the Forecasting Challenges in your classroom or you want to set up a stand-alone Challenge.
	About: Mission Statement, Shared Values & Principles, Member Profiles and Forecasting Projects
	Working Groups Organized Around Seven Cross-Cutting Themes: Theory; Statistical Methods & Tools; Cyberinfrastructure; Education; Diversity, Equity & Inclusion; Translation and Actionable Science; Standards for Forecast Output and Metadata
	Resources: Publications, Educational and Multimedia Resources, Videos
	Stay Connected: Our Listserv shares high-level announcements, our Blog highlights forecasting activities going on, you can follow us on Twitter @ecoforecast, or you can request to join our community of forecasters on Slack (send request to eco4cast.initiative@gmail.com)