Forecasting Standards | Ecological Forecasting Initiative

The Ecological Forecasting Initiative developed 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 standard focuses on output file formats and metadata, with additional notes on data and code repositories. 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/#!

Although the Standards are published, they continue to be a work in progress. If you find new use cases or issues as you are applying them to your own work, 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 not currently meeting.

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.