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.

The Standards are published!

Dietze, M.C., R.Q. Thomas, J. Peters, C. Boettiger, G. Koren, A.N. Shiklomanov, and J. Ashander. 2023. A Community Convention for Ecological Forecasting: Output Files and Metadata Version 1.0.  Ecosphere 14 (11): e4686. https://doi.org/10.1002/ecs2.4686.

The pre-print of version 0.5 of the manuscript:
Dietze, M., R. Q. Thomas, J. Peters, C. Boettiger, A.N. Shiklomanov, and J. Ashander. 2023. “A Community Convention for Ecological Forecasting: Output Files and Metadata v0.5.” EcoEvoRxiv. January 18. doi:10.32942/osf.io/9dgtq. https://ecoevorxiv.org/repository/view/4054/#!

Note that the Standards are a work in progress. If you find issues as you are applying them, contact us at eco4cast.initiative@gmail.com or submit an issue to the GitHub repo.

Forecasting Standards Working Group Schedule of Calls:
The Forecasting Standards Group is taking a hiatus. An announcement will be made when the group gets ready to schedule new calls. We are always open to people joining the calls, contact us at eco4cast.initiative@gmail.com

Mike Dietze provides an overview of the Forecast Standards in the first part of this recording from a workshop held at the EFI 2022 Conference on May 23-25, 2022. In the recording, Carl Boettiger also provides an overview of how cloud computing is being used to create and analyze forecasts for the EFI NEON Ecological Forecasting Challenge.