If you are going to the Ecological Society of America Conference in August 2025, check out the EFI-hosted session on Thursday, August 14 on “Ecological Forecasting for Research and Decision Making”. Details about an EFI community social forthcoming.
Thinking about going to AGU 2025 in December? Abstract submissions are open now until July 30 for the EFI-hosted session on “B033 – Ecological Forecasting in the Earth System.”
Engaged Science Tutorials. The EFI Translation & Actionable Science working group is rolling out short YouTube tutorials on the why, what, who, when, where, and how of engaging with interested parties, rightsholders, and end users of forecasts. Each tutorial also provides snippets from interviews with EFI community members and teams that exemplify a range of ways such collaborations have taken place.
You can find more details at: https://ecoforecast.org/engaged-research-tutorials/ Recordings will continue to be made public over the summer.
The 2025 EFI book club is taking place in June and July to read and discuss Data Feminism. The book is available wherever books are sold, online at https://data-feminism.mitpress.mit.edu/, and as an audiobook on Hoopla and other sources of audiobooks.
Find more details at: https://ecoforecast.org/resources/efi-book-club/
The Oceania EFI Chapter (OEFI) is hosting virtual seminar calls on 20 May, 24 July, 24 September, and 20 November at 3pm Sydney times.
The May seminar was on ‘Recent advances in satellite earth observation based water quality monitoring and forecasting in complex coastal ocean waters’. A recording for this seminar will be made available shortly.
OEFI will host a session at MODSIM. Abstracts and paper submissions due August 2025. Find details about MODSIM, upcoming calls, and recordings from previous OEFI calls at https://ecoforecast.org/oceania-ecological-forecasting-initiative/
The African EFI Chapter (AEFI) has officially launched! The group will host a short course in Cape Town 21-25th July.
Find details at: https://ecoforecast.africa/events/current/course_2025/
The European EFI Chapter (EEFI) hosted a Community Call on 11 June at 1pm CET to share activities in progress and upcoming opportunities to build the European ecological forecasting community and gather feedback from the European forecasting community.
The group will take a break for the summer from their monthly seminar series which will pick back up in September!
AGU & ESA Joint Special Collection Call for Papers
This special collection jointly hosted by the American Geophysical Union (AGU) and the Ecological Society of America (ESA) 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.
Submissions can be included in multiple AGU and ESA journals, see the full list of journals and details here: https://ecoforecast.org/special-collection-ecological-forecasting-in-the-earth-system/
Submission deadline: October 31, 2026
We have wrapped up the fourth round of the Statistical Methods Webinar series co-hosted by EFI and the ESA Statistical Ecology Section! Recordings and resources from all the webinars are available on the Statistical Methods Seminar webpage .
Email info@ecoforecast.org if you have suggestions for R or Python packages you would be interested in learning more about or have suggestions for speakers.
There are now three Forecasting Challenges available for anyone to participate and submit forecasts to.
1) EFI NEON Ecological Forecast Challenge.
2) EFI-USGS River Chlorophyll Forecasting Challenge.
3) Virginia Ecoforecast Reservoir Analysis (VERA) Forecasting Challenge.
Forecast Challenges can be used for classroom instruction. The cyberinfrastructure is now also 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.