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.

Methods Working Group Schedule of Calls:
The Methods & Cyberinfrastructure Group will meet jointly on January 18, February 15, March 15, April 12, May 10 at 2pm US Eastern. A new schedule will be created for June to August 2023. We are always open to people joining the calls, contact us at eco4cast.initiative@gmail.com

Methods Blog Posts and Resources

  • Introducing EFI Task Views!
  • R Shiny Seminar Series – recordings and resources from 4 seminars that demonstrated a variety of technical aspects for R Shiny web app development and provided example R code for a Shiny app that incorporates the features shared during the seminars. The topics in this series include:
    • A Primer to Creating Interactive Maps with Leaflet in Shiny
    • Improving Speed of Shiny Apps by Pre-Computing Models
    • Creative Visualization of Model Results and Uncertainty in Shiny
    • Visualization of Data in Space and Time: An Interactive Framework
  • Statistical Methods Webinar Series – recordings and resources from webinars on a range of statistical tools and R packages that can be used for each of the tools. The topics include:
    • Integrated Species Distribution Models (forthcoming May 2023)
    • Bayesian Stable Isotope Mixing Models and the MixSIAR R package (forthcoming April 2023)
    • State-space Models and the Template Model Builder (TMB) R package (forthcoming March 2023)
    • Spatial Modeling in Ecology (forthcoming February 2023)
    • Zero Inflated GLM and GLMM (forthcoming January 2023)
    • Structural Equation Models and the piecewiseSEM R package 
    • Analysis of Bioacoustic Data 
    • Spatial Occupancy Models and the spOccupancy R package
    • Hidden Markov Models,
    • NIMBLE,
    • Multi-species Occupancy Modeling,
    • Integrated Step-Selection Analysis,
    • Movement Ecology,
    • Generalized Joint Attribute Modeling (GJAM),
    • Generalized Additive Models (GAMs),
    • Species Archetype Models and Regions of Common Profile Models,
    • Mixed Models
Matt Brousil provides an overview of the Cyberinfrastructure and Methods Working Groups’ progress on the Task Views for the EFI 2022 Conference held May 23-25, 2021.

Notes from Working Group Calls
Chair: Jacob Zwart (USGS)

  1. February 15th, 2023 – joint CI and Methods Working Groups call
  2. January 18th, 2023 – joint CI and Methods Working Groups call
  3. December 9th, 2022 – joint CI and Methods Working Groups call
  4. November 11th, 2022 – joint CI and Methods Working Groups call
  5. October 14th, 2022 – joint CI and Methods Working Groups call
  6. September 16th, 2022 – joint CI and Methods Working Groups call
  7. August 11th, 2022 – joint CI and Methods Working Groups call
  8. July 21st, 2022 – joint CI and Methods Working Groups call
  9. June 9th, 2022 – joint CI and Methods Working Groups call
  10. May 12, 2022 – joint Methods and CI Working Groups call
  11. April 14, 2022 – joint Methods and CI Working Groups call
  12. March 10, 2022 – joint Methods and CI Working Groups call
  13. February 10, 2022 – joint Methods and CI Working Groups call
  14. January 13, 2022 – joint Methods and CI Working Groups call
  15. December 7, 2021 – joint Methods and CI Working Groups call
  16. November 9, 2021 – joint Methods and CI Working Groups call
  17. October 12, 2021 – joint Methods and CI Working Groups call
  18. September 21, 2021 – joint Methods and CI Working Groups call
  19. August 20, 2021 – joint Methods and CI Working Groups call
  20. July 16, 2021 – joint Methods and CI Working Groups call
  21. June 25, 2021 – joint Methods and CI Working Groups call
  22. May 24, 2021 – joint Methods and CI Working Groups call
  23. April 26, 2021 – joint Methods and CI Working Groups call
  24. March 29, 2021 – joint Methods and CI Working Groups call
  25. March 1, 2021 – joint Methods and CI Working Groups call
  26. February 1, 2021 – joint Methods and CI Working Groups call
  27. December 15, 2020 – joint Methods and CI Working Groups call
  28. November 17, 2020 – joint Methods and CI Working Groups call
  29. October 20, 2020 – joint Methods and CI Working Groups call
  30. September 22, 2020 – joint Methods and CI Working Groups call
  31. August 24, 2020 – joint Methods and CI Working Groups call
  32. July 27, 2020 – joint Methods and CI Working Groups call
  33. June 29, 2020 – joint Methods and CI Working Groups call
  34. June 1, 2020 – joint Methods and CI Working Groups call
  35. May 8, 2020 – joint Methods and CI Working Groups call
  36. April 17, 2020 – joint Methods and CI Working Groups call
  37. March 27, 2020 – joint Methods and CI Working Groups call
  38. February 21, 2020
  39. November 14, 2019
  40. September 26, 2019
  41. August 21, 2019
  42. July 10, 2019