Working Groups

Many of the Ecological Forecasting Initiative working groups are organized around 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.

A coastal and marine ecological forecasting working group has also been created to apply and integrate recommendations from the other EFI working groups and the terrestrial and freshwater NEON forecasting challenges to coastal and marine systems. 

EFI also has an Ecological Forecasting Student & Early Career Association that is open to any student and early career individual 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.  Prior to joining a working group, we ask that you review EFI’s Code of Conduct to support the community of practice.

The schedule of calls for September to December 2025. A new schedule will be created for January to May 2026.
  • Theory – Wednesdays at 11am US ET on September 10, October 8, November 12, and December 10
  • Translation & Actionable Science – Thursdays at 3pm US ET on September 18, October 16, November 20, and December 18
  • Cyberinfrastructure & Methods – Mondays at 3:30pm US ET on September 15, October 20, November 17, and December 8
  • Education and Diversity & Inclusion working groups will meet jointly at alternating Monday and Friday times – Monday, September 8 at 3:30pm ET, Friday, October 10 at 1:30pm ET, Monday, November 3 at 3:30pm, and Friday, December 5 at 1:30pm
  • Ecological Forecasting Students & Early Career Association – Tuesdays at 11:30am US ET on September 23, October 28, and November 25
  • Coastal and Marine Ecological Forecasting – A new schedule will be announced once finalized
  • Forecasting Standards – The Forecasting Standards working group is not meeting at this time

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 developed community standards to be used for the common formatting and archiving of ecological forecasts. The standards promote interoperability and facilitate forecast adoption, distribution, validation, and synthesis. The standard focuses on output file formats and metadata, with additional notes on data and code repositories. See the EFIstandards GitHub repository and Dietze et al. 2023 (https://doi.org/10.1002/ecs2.4686) for more details. Although the Standards are published, they continue to be a work in progress. If you find new use cases or issues as you apply them to your own work, 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.

Ecological Forecasting Initiative Student & Early Career Association (EFISECA)

Students and early career researchers (postdoctoral scholars and research technicians, etc) meet monthly to provide a community of support for early career individuals interested in ecological forecasting. The group provides a venue to network and with others.  Activities include discussions of relevant papers, short presentations of participants’ research, and developing collaborative group projects such as hackathons, software packages, educational resources, and publications.  Any student or early career individual interested in ecological forecasting is welcome to join.
Video overview of the Student Association Group

Coastal and Marine Ecological Forecasting (CMEF)

The Coastal and Marine Ecological Forecasting Working Group (CMEF) exists to advance the science, implementation, and societal relevance of ecological forecasting in coastal and marine ecosystems. Recognizing the inherently interdisciplinary nature of ecological forecasting, CMEF will collaborate across EFI Working Groups to integrate recommendations and evalute their applicability across the full forecasting pipeline—from data acquisition to decision support—while testing their robustness in real-world coastal and marine contexts. The group is also dedicated to fostering an inclusive community and will prioritize dissemination of its work through education, diversity, and knowledge transfer efforts, aligning with EFI’s broader mission and avoiding the creation of a disciplinary silo.