July 31, 2025

EFI is excited to connect with individuals in the broader community at ESA in Baltimore this year!

Below are details about the EFI Social, workshops, sessions organized by EFI, and other forecasting presentations and presentations by the EFI community. If you are presenting a poster or talk at ESA that you don’t see on the list, reach out so we can get it added to this list!

We will continue to make updates to this page prior to ESA.  All times listed below are in US Eastern Time.

EFI Social. Tuesday, Aug 12, 7:00-9:00pm

Connect and network with others in the EFI community over food at Tulsi’s Sobo Kitchen & Bar, just a short 15-minute walk from the Convention Center.

EFI Badges

We will have EFI badges that can be attached to the ESA name tags available for individuals who are part of the Ecological Forecasting Initiative community. Find Mike Dietze throughout the week or at the EFI Social on Tuesday to get a badge and look for others with the green badge!

EFI Organized Oral Session – Ecological Forecasting for Research and Decision Making
Thursday, August 14 at 8am-9:30am; Location Hilton Key 6

• James Holmquist (Smithsonian Environmental Research Center) – How (and why) to make probabilistic forecasts of coastal wetland ecosystem response to elevated sea-level rise
• Eric Ward (University of Maryland/NASA GSFC) – Operational seasonal forecasting of the terrestrial carbon cycle
• Jonathan Borelli (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute) – Using lake hydrodynamics to forecast impending algal blooms
• Megan Donahue (University of Hawaii at Manoa) – Sub-seasonal to seasonal forecasts for evaluating coral disease risk
• Yiluan Song (University of Michigan) – Experimental warming informs forecasts of forest tree phenology under climate change.

EFI Contributed Oral Session – Back and Forecasting in Ecology 
Thursday, Aug 14 at 1:30-3:00pm; Location BCC340

• Cayelan Carey (Virginia Tech) – High-frequency monitoring data reveal substantial variability in the intrinsic predictability of freshwater ecosystems
• Amy Patterson (University of Wyoming) – Approaches for handling missing data in ecological time series: a comparison of methods
• Natalia Quinteros Casaverde (NASA Goddard Space Flight Center) – Spectroscopic reconstruction of fresh-leaf moisture content in dried leaves
• Quinn Thomas (Virginia Tech) – Lessons learned from five years of the NEON Ecological Forecasting Challenge

Other Forecasting Presentations & Presentations by the EFI Community

If you are presenting an ecological forecasting-related talk or poster that you don’t see on the list, email EFI so we can get it added!

Presentations that are not about forecasting specifically, but are by EFI community members, are denoted with an *

Monday

• 1:45 -2:00 pm, Charlotte Malmborg (Boston University), BCC 338 – Forecasting recovery after insect defoliation: predicting forest recovery rates and disturbance outcomes
• 2:30-2:45 pm, Andrew Villeneuve (University of New Hampshire), BCC 349 – Walking the thermal landscape: Time-explicit thermal tolerance models improve our understanding of Marine Heatwaves’ biological effects

Tuesday

• 10:45-11:00 am, Pamela Rueda-Cediel (University of Kentucky), BCC 322 – Assessing the Performance of Past Predictions in Ecology: Comparing Population Viability Analysis (PVA) Forecasts Over the Last 40 years to Current Trends

Wednesday

• 10:00-10:15 am, Mike Dietze (Boston University), BCC 344 – THE PEcAn+SIPNET Terrestrial Carbon Cycle Reanalysis of North America: Development and Initial Validation
• 10:00-10:15 am, Diego Ellis Soto (University of California, Berkeley), BCC 340 – Global, near real-time ecological forecasting of mortality events through participatory science
• 11:00-11:15 am, Charles Yackulic (Southwest Biological Science Center), Hilton Key 6 – Forecasting invasion dynamics and developing causal knowledge to inform reservoir operations and water storage policy
• 4:45-5:00 pm, David Vasseur (Yale University), BCC 343 – Using thermal performance curves and population dynamic models to forecast extinction risk

Thursday

• *8:00 – 9:30 am, Abigail Lewis (Smithsonian Environmental Research Center), Hilton Holiday 3 – Leveraging marsh restoration for empowering climate change communication in northeastern National Parks. Abby is presenting in the Science Research and Engagement in Public Lands from Local to Global session
• 2:15 -2:30 pm, Jason McLachlan (University of Notre Dame), BCC 337 – Collaborative production of ecological forecasting curricula and mentorship that respect traditional knowledge
• 4:00 – 4:15 pm, Kathryn Hoffman (Virginia Tech), BCC 337 – Water quality forecast visualization co-design: A case study from Lake Sunapee, New Hampshire, USA

Thursday Poster Presentations; 5:00-6:30 pm, ESA Exhibit Hall

• Diego Centeno-Alvarado (Federal University of Pernambuco) – Forecasting climate change impacts on pollination services of key crops in northeastern Brazil through integrated ecological modeling
• *Rania Adouim (student working with Abigail Lewis), – Ten years of plant surveys reveal interactive effects of climate change and biological invasion on community composition in a coastal marsh

Workshops

Building Data Science Skills in the Classroom Using Ecological Forecasting; Tuesday, August 12, 8-9:30am; Location Hilton Holiday 3

Data science skills, such as wrangling, graphing, analyzing, and visualizing large datasets, are increasingly required for careers both within and beyond ecology. Within ecology, data science tools and approaches are evolving rapidly with the development of high-frequency sensor networks and other “big data” technologies, application of machine learning methods, and emergence of highly quantitative sub-disciplines such as ecological forecasting. As a result, ecologists must continually learn (and teach!) new data science skills throughout their careers, necessitating development of strong quantitative literacy and reasoning skills in ecology students. In this workshop, participants will explore an open-source, modular curriculum that aims to reduce the barrier to entry to data science and modeling skills – such as generating an ecological forecast or training a machine learning model – for both ecology students and instructors. The Macrosystems EDDIE program includes 1-3 hour learning modules that introduce skills such as formatting, visualizing, and interpreting high-frequency data; building ecological models; quantifying model uncertainty; and generating ecological forecasts for both aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems. We will work through module materials together and discuss pathways for integrating new data science, modeling, and forecasting approaches into both our teaching and research.

An Introduction to the NEON Ecological Forecasting Challenge: A Hands-On Example Using Ground Beetle Abundance and Richness; Tuesday, August 12, 11:45 AM – 1:15 PM EDT; Location Hilton Holiday 1

The Ecological Forecasting Initiative Research Coordination Network (EFI-RCN) has created a forecasting challenge (https://ecoforecast.org/efi-rcn-forecast-challenges/) for participants to forecast five different themes (aquatic ecosystems, terrestrial ecosystems, tick populations, phenology, and beetle communities) of publicly available data published by the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON, https://data.neonscience.org). The overall objectives of the challenge are to develop a community of practice for ecological forecasting, develop standards, build tools and cyberinfrastructure to facilitate forecasting, and create a platform for visualizing and evaluating forecast performance. These resources are openly available to anyone who is interested in learning about, creating, and/or using ecological forecasts. In this workshop we provide an overview of the theme focusing on forecasting ground beetle abundance and richness across NEON terrestrial sites. The workshop will include code-along instructions to help participants create and submit a relatively simple forecast to the EFI RCN NEON forecasting challenge platform, and how to interpret metrics of forecast skill. Our goal is to provide a foundation that participants can build upon to create more sophisticated predictions about ecological communities, and use the EFI RCN resources in future forecasting applications.