How do I get involved?
| Newsletter email LISTSERV: | Looking to stay abreast of what EFI is up to? For high level, infrequent announcements sign up for our LISTSERV. |
| Slack | EFI's Slack channel. Invite link sent with membership or email us, eco4cast.initiative at gmail dot com, to be added. Be sure to review EFI's Code of Conduct before you join. |
| Membership | Individuals who want to be listed as an EFI member can fill out this Form where you will be asked to provide your name, photo, email, social media, and a short, 1 sentence synopsis of what you’re working on. If you have a near-term forecast project you want to have highlighted you can also create a profile for the project using the same form. EFI membership allows you to vote for the EFI Steering Committee or be added to the ballot as a potential Steering Committee member. At the moment there are no formal requirements for membership, but we encourage members to be active participants in EFI working groups and discussion boards. Members should be interested in building the community of practice around near-term ecological forecasts. |
| Workshops | Find details about past and future workshops and conferences. |
| Book Club | We host book groups to discuss relevant books throughout the year. See the books we have read and those that are coming up here. |
| NEON Forecast Challenge | The NSF-funded EFI Research Coordination Network (EFI-RCN) is hosting a NEON Ecological Forecast Challenge with the goal to create a community of practice that builds capacity for ecological forecasting by leveraging NEON data products. The Challenge revolves around the five theme areas listed below that span aquatic and terrestrial systems, and population, community, and ecosystem processes across a broad range of ecoregions that uses data collected by NEON. The Challenge is open to any individual or team that wants to submit forecasts. Details about the Challenge, instructions on how to participate, and resources for using the Challenge in academic courses are availableHERE. |
| Working Groups | EFI's Working Groups are organized around seven cross-cutting themes as well as a student-focused group:
Working groups aim to foster communication and coordination of efforts among like-minded researchers, potentially working in different disciplines and on different ecological processes. This may include, but is not limited to, the development of community resources (e.g. software, databases), synthesis of existing knowledge, new collaborative proposals, discussions of standards and best practices, educational materials, and opportunities, as well as a more informal cross-fertilization of ideas. One need not be an expert in an area to join a working group — working groups are as much (if not more) about learning from each other as they are about advancing the state of the science. If you are interested in joining one or more working group please Contact Us. |
| International Chapters | Ecological forecasting is important across the world and the EFI supports the creation of Chapters that will allow communities to focus on topics, data streams, and policy that is specific to a particular country or region. EFI currently has 3 international chapters. An African chapter is in the initial stages of development. Currently, the chapter is only gathering information from those interested in participating in, contributing to, or collaborating with the initiative. If that includes you, please fill in this Google Form. |
| Partner Organizations | EFI membership is not limited to individuals. Organizations interested in participating in or partnering with the EFI are encouraged to join. Partner organizations could include but are not limited to, governmental agencies, NGOs, data networks, citizen science initiatives, and industry partners involved in either the production or use of ecological forecasts (natural resources, tech, sensors, etc.). Organizations interested in partnering with EFI are encouraged to Contact Us. |
| Forecast Project Profiles | Have an interesting forecasting project running you want to highlight to the community? Our Forecasting Profiles page provides a listing of near-term iterative ecological forecasts. Fill out this form to have your project added to the listing. |
| YouTube Recordings | Recordings from EFI seminars and conference workshops are available on the EFI YouTube channel, youtube.com/@ecoforecast. |
| GitHub | The eco4cast GitHub organization (github.com/eco4cast) has a number of repositories with code related to EFI ecological forecasting projects including the NEON Ecological Forecast Challenge. |
| Education Resources on QUBESNews | A number of the Educational Resources are available as open educational resources on the QUBES platform. You can access the resources on QUBES individually below or find all of them compiled on QUBES here. You can find other educational material on the Educational Resources webpage. |
| Forecasting Papers Bibliography | The EFI Bibliography Zotero Group library has an extensive list of citations. Use the Filter Tags section in the lower left-hand corner of this library to search for papers tagged related to the following topics. “EFI DEI Paper” – papers listed in the Bibliography linked on our EFI Diversity and Inclusion webpage “EFI Slack Paper” – papers posted in the Slack #papers channel “EFI Visualization Paper” – a compilation of resources for best practices for visualizing forecasts listed on our Social Science webpage “EFI Partners & Knowledge Transfer Paper” – papers compiled by the Partners & Knowledge Transfer Working Group on co-production, team science, translational science, science communication, etc. “EFI Publication” – publications that are specifically related to EFI activities and acknowledge an EFI funding source or are a product that came from an EFI working group |
| News | EFI is always looking for relevant news and posts to share with the community. Have some new paper or research activity you want to highlight? Are you giving a webinar soon? Want to write a vignette showing how to use some useful tool or method? Want to report news from a working group? Contact Us with your latest news and ideas for blog posts! |