Tag Archives: Outreach

Translation Needs for the EFI Community

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February 2, 2023
By the Translation Working Group

Translational ecology aims to increase the usability of knowledge and products beyond scientific communities by integrating socio-environmental knowledge and stakeholders or end users as partners in the process and projects. For the past few months, the Translation and Actionable Science Working Group has been working to gauge the translational needs of the EFI community and to identify where modelers and physical scientists see gaps in connecting to stakeholders and end users to conduct translational research.  The goal of this post is to share what the working group has identified as priorities for translational needs and share where there are connections to what other working groups and organizations are doing.

Michael Gerst (University of Maryland) led interviews in October-November 2022 with nine individuals across EFI that represent a range of early to late career stages, institutional type (academic, NGO, U.S. government agency), and gender to learn about interviewees’ experiences with forecasting projects that required stakeholder interaction, what went well, what didn’t, and what would have been useful to improve stakeholder engagement. The EFI Translation Working Group is using the results from these interviews to prioritize and develop activities that can help to fill those gaps.

The following seven topics were identified from the interviews and Working Group discussions that could be developed into self-contained seminars, manuals, or guidance documents (for short-term activities) or hosting larger workshops or proposal writing opportunities (for longer-term activities).  Cases where topics overlap with other EFI working group discussions and activities are also highlighted. 

  1. How can EFI serve as an advocate for ecological forecasting to stakeholder groups, especially the public sector?
    In some cases, the individuals interviewed found that the stakeholders they work with were not interested as much in the forecasts provided as they were in the real-time data that was provided during the data collection and forecast process.  These real-time data allowed the stakeholders to use their expert knowledge to make informed decisions that may or may not have been related to the forecasts that the teams provided. Within academia, there has been quite a bit of work to raise the profile of ecological forecasting, but there is now the opportunity to bring this awareness outside academia to private and government sectors to both promote the benefits of ecological forecasts in settings outside academia and listen to the needs of stakeholders. 
  1. What’s the appropriate level of stakeholder engagement? Is co-production always the right answer?
    Co-production is increasingly seen as a method for improving the fit between science and stakeholder needs. However, it can be time-consuming and expensive, necessitating assessment of whether its potential benefits are a good match for a project. While understanding of the contexts in which co-production can be fruitful has improved, there is still a gap in distilling guidelines for scientists on when it is appropriate, and if not, what other options exist.
  1. How to help colleagues find collaborators across disciplines (i.e., matchmaking) as well as providing guidance on what makes a fruitful multi-disciplinary collaboration?
    This topic, as well the previous point about the appropriate level of stakeholder engagement connects with conversations and a blog post the EFI Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) working group is having and developing that highlights the need to bring in collaborators at the beginning of a project to learn what is of most interest to them. The DEI group has focused on underrepresented individuals in terms of race/gender, but this can also be applicable to underrepresented disciplines in ecological forecasting like social science.
    This topic also connects with previous discussions in the former Partners and Knowledge Translation working group (which merged with the former Social Science group to become the current Translation working group). Previous discussions have revolved around how to keep a database of individuals and groups that support matchmaking connections. The group has also discussed the need for forums or meetings to allow groups to pitch ideas and socialize early ideas that can then be followed up to develop proposals to fund those ideas.  Clearly, this is something that resonates both within the working groups and across the broader EFI community.
  1. How to initiate, foster, and maintain stakeholder relationships?
    In 2021 and early 2022 the Partners and Knowledge Transfer and Social Science working groups hosted a number of seminars on science communication and co-production.  In particular, the May 4, 2021 seminar on co-production provides some initial resources that could be built out further for this topic.  The discussions and the upcoming blog post the EFI DEI working group is developing that highlight ways to connect to underrepresented groups will also provide useful resources related to fostering relationships.
  1. How to understand stakeholder decision-making processes?
    In the interviews, a few anecdotes were shared that ultimately can be summarized as: we thought we knew how stakeholders make decisions (with forecasts!) but experience eventually proved otherwise. In addition to learning the process of stakeholder engagement, interviewees thought there would be utility in helping modelers understand the universe of ways stakeholders might make decisions and where forecasts fit in (or don’t!).
  1. How to set up extended project planning to ensure continued operationalization?
    It is important to have a plan in place for how ecological forecasts will be operationalized after the initial set of funding expires. Stakeholders are frustrated if they start to use a forecast and then it is no longer available when the funding is over.  NASA provides one example of how to avoid this issue.  In NASA’s Ecological Conservation Applications, solicitations (e.g., A.40 Earth Science Applications: Ecological Conservation) often require proposal teams to include partners/end users who will also be responsible for maintaining the ecological forecasting products (e.g, web apps) beyond the NASA funding period.
  1. How to make data, models, and systems that are documented and reusable (FAIR data, models)?This is a topic that is of interest across multiple working groups in the EFI community. The Forecasting Standards working group has recently submitted a manuscript for publication titled “A Community Convention for Ecological Forecasting: Output Files and Metadata.” The preprint is available here: https://ecoevorxiv.org/9dgtq/. The manuscript focuses on suggestions for documenting ecological forecasts.  The Cyberinfrastructure and Methods working group has also been thinking about the issue where groups creating ecological forecasts continue to develop one-off or boutique workflows.  That working group is writing a workshop proposal to bring the together people from government agencies, industry, NGOs, and academia together to develop a way to share forecasts and workflows so people don’t need to reinvent a forecast workflow. Instead, new forecasts can be created that borrow strength from resources already developed for similar models or workflows and instead be able to focus on the details and nuances of applying a forecast in their own study system or domain. This also resonates with what the EFI NEON Ecological Forecasting Challenge is working on with the cyberinfrastructure that is set up for accessing target and meteorological data and accepting, scoring, and visualizing forecasts across multiple NEON Data streams.

EFI at AGU 2022

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Date: December 4, 2012

Below is the list of poster and oral presentations for EFI’s hosted session at the American Geophysical Union (AGU) 2022 Conference in Chicago, as well as other ecological forecasting-related talks that may be of interest to the community. All times are listed in US Central Time.

Thursday EFI Social – Anyone who is available to meet up on December 15, Thursday evening, we’ll have a group getting together at Kroll’s South Loop starting around 6:30 – 8:30pm. It’s an 18-minute walk from the Convention Center. Find directions here.

Friday Poster and Oral Sessions – EFI’s oral and poster sessions on “Ecological Forecasting in the Earth System” will be held on Friday, December 16, 2012. The in-person Poster Session is from 9am-12:30pm in Poster Hall A (South, Level 3). The Online Poster Session is from 1:45-2:45pm. The Oral session is from 4:45-6:15pm in S501bcd (South, Level 5). We’re excited to have a great set of speakers that really span the full gradient from terrestrial to freshwater to marine. Come check out the following talks!

Friday EFI In-Person Poster Session (9:00-12:30, Poster Hall A)

Friday EFI Online Poster Session (1:45-2:45pm, Online)

Friday EFI Oral Session (4:45-6:15pm, S501bcd – South, Level 5)

Other Forecasting Presentations –

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

Serious Fun: Reimagining Virtual Events Recap

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December 2, 2021

Post by Jody Peters

The EFI Partner’s Working Group hosted Pablo Suarez on November 19 for an intensely participatory Zoom call session titled “Serious Fun: Reimagining Virtual Events on Ecological Forecasting”. This was the first of a 2-part series on science communication. The second session, “Sharing is Caring: Communicating Science Beyond Academic Publications” will be held on January 19. You can find details and register for the January session here.

The first session on November 19 was not recorded due to the intensely participatory nature of the call. However, below we share an overview of the call and resources shared by Pablo.

Pablo Suarez is innovation lead at the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre, a visiting fellow at Boston University, and an artist in residence at the National University of Singapore. He directs the Climate Centre’s initiatives linking applied knowledge with humanitarian work, as well as new approaches to climate risk management. Examples of his work include participatory games for learning about climate change and dialogue, and forecast-based financing pilots in Togo and Uganda.

Pablo started with the premise that disasters are collaborating better than humans are – for example, things like the pandemic, climate issues, and conflicts are exponentially causing harm and we need to have better collaborations between those who know and those who do. And if we want to effectively work with other scientists, people impacted by what we study, or policymakers, we need to let people know how much we care about what they care about. Often we convey information and work to develop collaborations through meetings and presentations typically with a keynote or series of talks followed by a short Q&A session. Pablo advocated that there are better ways to communicate and develop collaborations during meetings and conferences and that is by using games and including humor and spontaneity as a way to broaden engagement and make connections.

As I worked with Pablo to coordinate the logistics for the call and compile the advertising material, I didn’t grasp what the “Serious Fun” part of his talk title meant. But after participating on the call, I am inspired to think about ways to incorporate his suggestions for reimagining virtual events which are low-carbon and low-budget compared to in-person events. We know Zoom fatigue is real, but by including spontaneity, humor, and games, virtual events can be more engaging and can lead to deepened networks and collective action. By having fun, we can be more effective at conveying serious ideas about science, ecological forecasting, and making decisions.

Below I describe the two major activities held during the call and end with a list of the resources Pablo shared.

1. Rant

One group activity was called Rant. Early on in the call, we had a short amount of time to write out all our frustrations with Zoom calls. It was fast-paced and Pablo really encouraged us to get into the Rant by expressing our frustrations through things like capitalization, exclamation marks, etc. Later after other activities in the call, we had the opportunity to go back to rants submitted by ourselves and by others on the call to think about changes that could be made to alleviate issues with Zoom calls. You can see a few example rants and changes below and you can find all the rants here. I particularly appreciated the second example below, since that was my rant.

2. Decisions for Seasons

The other major activity Pablo facilitated was a version of Decisions for Seasons, a game designed to support learning and dialogue about key aspects of planning for extremes and experiencing climate change impacts and managing risk. In this game, everyone had 10 forecasts about the climate conditions for the next year. We could choose if the conditions would be regular/normal (thumbs up) or if we should plan for drought insurance (buckets) or flood insurance (umbrellas). This game was also fast-paced with only about a minute to make these decisions. After everyone had made their predictions about the future conditions, Pablo rolled a die where a 1 meant there was a drought and a 6 meant there was a flood and we all hoped we had picked enough drought or flood insurance to handle those rolls! The fun part was then seeing whose predictions were correct and who ended up getting broken hearts for incorrect predictions (see the second image below). Although we didn’t have time during our call, an extension to this game is to incorporate climate change by using an 8-sided die where floods become represented by a 6, 7, or 8 increasing the chance of an extreme event.  You can find more details about how this game can be played here.

Screenshot from GoodGames “Decisions for Seasons” game showing options for investing to plan for next year’s conditions.
Screenshot example of the results from the game after 10 rolls of a die

Throughout the call we had fun, there were moments of heart-racing tension to get our predictions and answers in, there were opportunities for competition and collaboration, and plenty of joy. But there was also a seriousness moving forward to think about what we are doing with forecasts, how we can improve forecasts, how we can improve people’s access, understanding, and opportunity to act, and how we can enable people to make decisions with forecasts.

While this seminar focused on how to make virtual events more engaging, Pablo’s suggestions and resources can also be applied to in-person conferences and meetings, classes, and lab meetings.  Let’s have more fun, let’s be more engaged!

Resources

For those interested in exploring how to incorporate games into your presentations and to find ways to make your audiences know you care about what they care about, the following are resources Pablo shared during the call.

  1. The Climate Centre’s website has lots of resources (climatecentre.org).  In particular, there is a section about humour and a number of climate games.  
    1. There are almost 30 climate games applicable for small to large groups (n=6-100) and that cover a range of topics including climate change adaptation and mitigation, collaboration, disaster risk reduction, health, resilience, etc. Each game includes learning objectives, intended audiences, required materials, and pdf and video tutorials. A number of the games specifically connect to forecasting and decision making incuding the Decisions for Seasons game we played during the call. Two other examples include
      • Before the Storm – a decision-making game designed to introduce weather forecasts and possible actions to take against natural disasters through different roles.
      • Paying for Predictions – a participatory activity to experience the impacts of climate change, to understand the value of forecasts and to enhance the understanding of climate smart disaster risk reduction.
  2. Pablo used the GoodGames platform during our call for the Rant and Decisions for the Season activities. The Decisions for the Season can be played in person with the instructions linked on the Climate Centre’s website, but GoodGames has also made an online version here. You can learn more about GoodGames here: https://gg.goodfocus.net/about/. The games do cost money, but if this was something you or your organization were interested in, it would be worth checking in with GoodGames. I believe their are discounts for those in non-profits.
  3. Pablo shared a 2016 paper he is a co-author on, “Using a Game to Engage Stakeholders in Extreme Event Attribution Science“. You can find his other publications about climate games here.

Diversity with EFI and How You Can Get Involved

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Date: June 18, 2020

Post by: The EFI Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Working Group

The Ecological Forecasting Initiative, like many other organizations, calls for justice for George Floyd and countless other Black individuals and persons of color, and we stand in solidarity with our Black colleagues and friends saying #BlackLivesMatter. Our EFI Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) Working Group is committed to listening, learning, and exploring ways to promote anti-racism and to make EFI, and STEM fields more broadly, a welcoming environment. In regards to ecological forecasting, as a first step, we need the input and experience from people of all backgrounds at all stages of the ecological forecasting process, from forecast development and implementation to stakeholder decisions. Ecological forecasting as a field is relatively new; creating an inclusive, anti-racist field starts with understanding the lived experiences of all types of forecasters, end-users, and community stakeholders. We have more in-depth initiatives and tasks associated with the current NSF funded EFI-RCN grant and other proposals submitted for review, but for now, the following are four ways we invite you to get involved by joining the group, using or adding to our Bibliography of resources, filling out a short 5-minute survey, or joining our book club.

ONE
Of all the EFI Working Groups, our DEI Group has the smallest number of participants. We welcome anyone who is interested in participating to learn more about ways to expand diversity and inclusion as well as brainstorming ways to increase diversity within the ecological forecasting field. Our next call is June 30 and upcoming monthly meetings are posted on the EFI’s DEI webpage, as is our Strategic Plan, which is a living document that provides an overview of the steps the DEI Working Group is taking to promote diversity, accessibility, and inclusion in EFI. Email eco4cast.initiative@gmail.com to be added to the mailing list for this group.

TWO
If you are not able to join the Working Group calls at this time, there are additional ways to get involved. We are compiling a Bibliography that provides resources for learning more about anti-racism and the diversity status of fields relevant to ecological forecasting. These resources include lists of minority supporting associations, links to diversity and inclusion plans from professional societies, blog posts, publications, and compiled lists of resources from other organizations. This is also a living document, to which we will add additional documents moving forward. If there are additional resources you have found useful, they can be submitted through this Google form.

THREE
As part of Step 1 of our Strategic Plan, “Identify and clarify the problem”, we are working to identify the current status of diversity within fields relevant to ecological forecasting as a baseline to assess the current status of diversity within the Ecological Forecasting Initiative, specifically. Once we assess the current diversity status of EFI, our next goal is to provide suggestions to ecological forecasting labs about ways to recruit more diverse students into our undergraduate and graduate programs.
To assess the current status of diversity within fields relevant to ecological forecasting we are using the NSF funded NCSES Interactive Data Tool IPEDS database of the racial and ethnic backgrounds of students that have graduated from US institutions in over 400 academic programs. We have narrowed down the list to 29 academic degrees and are asking for your help to rank the relevance of these degrees to ecological forecasting in this short survey (https://nd.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_3Pdyo1bh5OG8R93). Once we know which academic degrees are most relevant to ecological forecasting, we can assess the current diversity of those degrees relative to EFI. We will then work on Step 2 of our Strategic Plan, “Identify barriers that may prevent students from underrepresented groups from participating in ecological forecasting.”

FOUR
To encourage open, honest conversation and anti-racist thinking, EFI will host its first virtual book club. We will begin with The Years That Matter Most: How College Makes or Breaks Us by Paul Tough. Tough’s book explores privilege in higher education, from the application process to the classroom. As many forecasters are educators and participants in higher education, we believe this book will serve the interests of EFI’s mission while helping participants grow in anti-racist values. The book club is open to all participants, regardless of EFI membership, race, ethnicity, gender, religion, or any other personal identity – we ask only that you participate with an open mind and a willingness for vulnerability. For those who would like to participate but need help acquiring the book, we have a limited amount of financial assistance available. Email eco4cast.initiative@gmail.com for more info.
Logistics: The book club will meet weekly, in the evenings, starting the week of July 13th, with about 40-70 pages of reading per meeting (although meeting frequency and page counts can be adjusted to meet the needs of the group). If you are interested in participating, email eco4cast.initiative@gmail.com so we can send you the doodle poll to find a day/time for the group to meet.

EFI Guest Post on Dynamic Ecology

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Date: June 8, 2020

EFI Member Nick Record (Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences) led an effort with Jaime Ashander (Resources for the Future), Peter Adler (Utah State University), and Michael Dietze (Boston University) to write a guest post titled “Ecological forecasting ethics: lessons for COVID-19” for Dynamic Ecology|Multa novit vulpes.

You can find the post here:

https://dynamicecology.wordpress.com/2020/06/08/ecological-forecasting-ethics-lessons-for-covid-19/

EFI at AGU 2019

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Date: December 6, 2019

EFI’s oral and poster sessions on “Ecological Forecasting in the Earth System” have been scheduled for Wednesday, December 11, 2019 from 4-6pm in Moscone 3001 (oral session) and on Wednesday morning from 8am-12:20pm(posters). We’re excited to have a great set of speakers that really span the full gradient from terrestrial to freshwater to marine. Come check out the following talks!

Wednesday EFI Oral Session (4-6pm, Moscone 3001)

16:00 Nicole Lovenduski – High predictability of terrestrial carbon fluxes from an initialized decadal prediction system
16:15 Ben Bond-Lamberty – Linking field, model, and remote sensing methods to understand when tree mortality breaks the forest carbon cycle
16:30 Zoey Werbin – Forecasting the Soil Microbiome
16:45 Brian Enquist – Forecasting future global biodiversity: Predicting current and future global plant distributions, community structure, and ecosystem function
17:00 Heather Welch – Managing the ocean in real-time: Ecological forecasts for dynamic management
17:15 Clarissa Anderson – Bringing new life to harmful algal bloom prediction after crossing the valley of death
17:30 Ryan McClure – Successful real-time prediction of methane ebullition rates in a eutrophic reservoir using temperature via iterative near-term forecasts
17:45 Carl Boettiger – Theoretical Limits to Forecasting in Ecological Systems (And What to Do About It)

Wednesday EFI Poster Session (8am-12:20pm, Moscone South Poster Hall)

Christopher Trisos – B31J-2509 The Projected Timing of Abrupt Ecological Disruption from Climate Change
Gleyce K. D. Araujo Figueiredo – B31J-2510 Spatial and temporal relationship between aboveground biomass and the enhanced vegetation index for a mixed pasture in a Brazilian integrated crop livestock system
Rafael Vasconcelos Valadares B31J-2511 Modeling Brazilian Integrated Crop-Livestock Systems
Zhao Qian – B31J-2512 An optimal projection of the changes in global leaf area index in the 21st century
Takeshi Ise – B31J-2513 Causal relationships in mesoscale teleconnections between land and sea: a study with satellite data
Hisashi Sato – B31J-2514 Reconstructing and predicting global potential natural vegetation with a deep neural network model
Masanori Onishi – B31J-2515 The combination of UAVs and deep neural networks has a potential as a new framework of vegetation monitoring
Yurika Oba – B31J-2516 VARENN: Graphical representation of spatiotemporal data and application to climate studies
Stephan Pietsch – B31J-2517 A Fast and Easy to use Method to Forecast the Risks of Loss of Ecosystem Stability: The Epsilon Section of Correlation Sums
Jake F Weltzin – B31J-2518 Developing capacity for applied ecological forecasting across the federal research and natural resource management community
Theresa M Crimmins – B31J-2519 What have we learned from two seasons of forecasting phenology? The USA National Phenology Network’s experience operationalizing Pheno Forecasts
Tim Sheehan – B31J-2520 Sharp Turn Ahead: Modeling the Risk of Sudden Forest Change in the Western Conterminous United States
Margaret Evans – B31J-2521 Continental-scale Projection of Future Douglas-fir Growth from Tree Rings: Testing the Limits of Space-for-Time Substitution
Ann Raiho – B31J-2522 Improving forecasting of biome shifts with data assimilation of paleoecological data
Quinn Thomas – B31J-2523 Near-term iterative forecasting of water quality in a reservoir reveals relative forecastability of physical, chemical, and biological dynamics
Alexey N Shiklomanov – B31J-2524 Structural and parameter uncertainty in centennial-scale simulations of community succession in Upper Midwest temperate forests
Peter Kalmus – B31J-2525 Identifying coral refugia from observationally weighted climate model ensembles
Jessica L O’Connell – B31J-2526 Spatiotemporal variation in site-wide Spartina alterniflora belowground biomass may provide an early warning of tidal marsh vulnerability to sea level rise
Rafael J. P. Schmitt – B31J-2527 Assessing existing and future dam impacts on the connectivity of freshwater fish ranges worldwide
Teng Keng Vang – B31J-2528 Site characteristics of beaver dams in southwest Ohio

Other Forecasting Presentations

Mon 13:40-15:40, Moscone South e-Lightning Theater: Alexandria Hounshell, ED13B-07 Macrosystems EDDIE: Using hands-on teaching modules to build computational literacy and water resources concepts in undergraduate curricula (Alex’s presentation will be at ~2pm)
Mon 13:40-18:00, Poster Hall: Hamze Dokoohaki B13F-2442 – A model–data fusion approach to estimating terrestrial carbon budgets across the contiguous U.S
Mon 14:25, Moscone 3005: Michael Dietze B13A-04 – Near real-time forecasting of terrestrial carbon and water pools and fluxes
Mon 17:40, Moscone 3003: Michael Dietze B14B-11 Near real-time forecasting in the biogeosciences: toward a more predictive and societally-relevant science
Tues 13:40-18:00, Poster Hall: Erin Conlisk B23F-2598 – Forecasting Wetland Habitat to Support Multi-Species Management Decisions in the Central Valley of California
Wed 08:00-12:20, Poster Hall: B31H Building Resilient Agricultural Systems Supported by Near-Term Climate and Yield Forecasts II [Poster Session]
Wed 13:55, Moscone 3005: Inez Fung B33A-02 – Towards verifying national CO2 emissions
Thurs 09:15, Moscone 3012: John Reager B41A-06 – Hydrological predictors of fire danger: using satellite observations for monthly to seasonal forecasting 
Fri 10:20-12:20, Moscone 3007: B52A Building Resilient Agricultural Systems Supported by Near-Term Climate and Yield Forecasts I [Oral Session]

EFI Social

Anyone who is available to meet up after the Forecasting Session on Wednesday, we’ll have a group getting together at Tempest starting around 6:30 pm. It’s an 8 minute walk. Find directions here.

Seeking Judges for Outstanding Student Presentations

We would like to recruit judges for the student presentations in our forecasting sessions at AGU this year. We have one candidate for Outstanding Student Presentation in our poster session on Wednesday morning (B31J) and two candidates in our oral session Wednesday afternoon (B34C). If you plan to attend either of these sessions, please consider helping to mentor a young researcher with some constructive feedback.
You can sign up to judge at https://ospa.agu.org/2019/ospa/judges/ to register and agree to the honor code by selecting “Register to Judge”.Once there, sign up for the student presentations you wish to evaluate. Every judge must sign up for at least three presentations to ensure that all students are provided with feedback. Select “Find Presentations”. You can search for presentations by B31J or B34C in the lower of the two “quick search” boxes.When you arrive for Fall Meeting, confirm the time and location of the presentations you are evaluating. You can sync your judging schedule to your personal calendar to ensure you don’t accidentally miss any presentations. Go to your OSPA schedule and click ‘Add to Calendar’ on the task bar. Your judging schedule will now be added to your Google Calendar, Outlook, or iCalendar.You will need to evaluate all presentations you volunteered to judge. Students depend on your feedback to assess their presentation skills, identify the areas in which they are performing well, and areas that need improvement.Either submit scores in real time on a tablet or mobile device or take notes while you evaluate students and enter the scores later. Do not rely on your memory alone to submit complete scores at a later time. Students participate in OSPA to improve their presentation skills, so please provide them with thorough feedback. This year, comments are required in addition to the numerical scores. All reviews must be entered into the OSPA site no later than Friday, 20 December 2019, at 11:59 p.m. EDT.Finally, be constructive! OSPA presenters range in education levels from undergraduate to Ph.D. students. There are also many presenters for whom English is not their first language. Keep these things in mind when providing feedback. Judges are asked to evaluate students at their current education and language proficiency levels.

EFI Status Update: Accomplishments over the Past 6 Months

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Date: December 1, 2019

Post by Michael Dietze, Boston University

We have had a busy 6 months with lots of progress and community building for the Ecological Forecasting Initiative. Here is a summary of what the group has been up to since the EFI meeting in DC in May.

Participants at the May 2019 EFI Meeting in Washington, DC

The inaugural meeting of the Ecological Forecasting Initiative took place at AAAS Headquarters in Washington, DC on May 13-15, 2019. The meeting brought together >100 participants from a broad array of biological, social, and physical environmental sciences and spanning internationally across academia, government agencies, and non-profits. Overall, it was a highly productive meeting that generated a lot of excitement about our growing community of practice. The meeting was organized around EFI’s seven themes (Theory, Decision Science, Education, Inclusion, Methods, Cyberinfrastructure, Partners) with a mix of keynotes, lightning talks, and panel discussions on each area. The panel discussions were particularly valued by participants, as they generated dynamics community discussions and often highlighted the perspectives of early-career participants. The meeting also included time for break out discussions, starting with a series of sessions (with participants randomly intermixed) addressing high-level questions about the opportunities for advancing science and decision making, and the challenges and bottlenecks facing our community. These breakouts then fed into a later set of sessions, organized by theme, where individuals self-organized by interest to synthesize what we learned and to start discussing next steps.  Finally, there was a healthy amount of unstructured break time, as well as a conference dinner on Monday night and a poster session on Tuesday early evening, that provided attendees with time for informal discussions and networking. A post-meeting survey showed overall satisfaction with the meeting was very high (4.8 of 5), as was the likelihood of attending another EFI meeting (4.6 of 5).

The original conference plan was for the breakout groups organized around the EFI cross-cutting themes to be the kick-off of the theme working groups. In practice, this was delayed slightly by the NSF Science Technology Center preproposal deadline (June 25) which occupied much of the organizing committee’s time in the ~6 weeks post-conference. However, working group telecons kicked off in July and all eight working groups have continued to meet virtually on Zoom at approximately a monthly frequency. Based on group discussions at the conference, and our post-meeting survey, a number of key ideas emerged for the working groups to focus on. A top priority was the establishment of community standards for forecast archiving, meta-data, and application readiness levels. Standards will allow our growing community to more easily perform higher-level synthesis, disseminate predictions, develop shared tools, and allow third-party validation. The bulk of the work on developing a draft set of forecast standards has been taken on by the Theory working group, which is focused on making sure forecast outputs and metadata will be able to support larger, synthetic analyses. Theory has also held joint meetings about Standards with Cyberinfrastructure, which has focused on the CI needs of archives (blog post in prep), repeatability/replication, and the standardization of model inputs. Application Readiness Levels (ARLs) have also been discussed by the Decision team, which wanted to evaluate whether existing NASA and NOAA ARLs reflect decision readiness.

Second, there was considerable enthusiasm for discussing and documenting best practices, both around the technical aspects of forecasting and for decision science and interacting with stakeholders. On the technical side the Methods and Tools team is working on a document summarizing the tools being used by the community in seven key areas: Visualization & Decisions Support tools; Uncertainty quantification; Data ingest; Data cleaning & harmonization; User interfaces; Workflows & Reproducibility; Modeling & Statistics. The primary goal of this exercise is to produce a set of EFI webpages that inform forecast developers about the tools available (especially newer members of the community). The secondary goal is to enable a gap analysis that will help the Methods and Tools team prioritize areas where needed tools are missing or not meeting the needs of the community. At the same time, the Decision team has been discussing the stakeholder side of best practices, has already produced two blogs about lessons learned by NOAA in translating from Research to Operations (R2O), and a third blog is being drafted that describes areas in the ecological forecasting process where social science can provide valuable input. Similarly, the Partners team has been thinking about how to improve the ‘matchmaking’ process between stakeholders and forecasters and is working on a survey to reach out to potential EFI partners to let them know what EFI is, what we are doing, and to learn how organizations are currently using data, models, and forecasts and where there is the potential for synergies with EFI.

Third, the community is interested in the expansion of educational materials and open courseware. The Education and Diversity teams have mostly been meeting together and have discussed key forecasting vocabulary and are working with EFI’s Cayelan Carey, who has a new NSF Macrosystems grant to develop undergraduate forecasting modules, to develop a survey of forecast instructors to provide information on (and a compilation of) syllabi, code, problem sets, and topics currently being taught, pre-requisites, and input on what new forecasting teaching material would be most useful. The Diversity team is also drafting a Strategic Plan to work on increasing diversity and inclusion in EFI and ecological forecasting more generally.  Steps in this plan include: 1) Identifying the current diversity status, 2) Identifying the barriers, 3) Identifying solutions and which solutions make sense to work on given the participants and networks currently in EFI, 4) Identify who else needs to be involved and make a plan to bring them in, and 5) Form collaborations and seek funding to carry out the plan.

Fourth, there was interest at the EFI conference in supporting the development of an EFI student community. The EFI student group was launched in August and is working on developing a charter, forming a steering committee, and running a journal discussion group.

Working Groups are always open for new people to join. There are 3 more calls scheduled before the end of the year: Education on Dec 4, Social Science on Dec 16, and Partners on Dec 17 all at 1pm US eastern time.  Polls will be sent out in mid-December to set recurring times for working group calls in Jan-May 2020.  If you would like to join a working group and be included on any of the remaining calls or if you wish to participate in the polls to set times for next year’s calls, email eco4cast.initiative@gmail.com. 

In addition, to responding to the ideas discussed at the EFI2019 conference, the EFI working groups are also involved in the planning process for the EFI Research Coordination Network. This NSF RCN funding was awarded after the EFI2019 meeting and ensures that EFI will continue to meet and grow over the next five years. The EFI RCN is also launching an open forecasting challenge using NEON data, the protocols for which will be finalized at the first RCN meeting, May 12-14, 2020 in Boulder, CO at NEON headquarters.

Other key products of the EFI2019 meeting are the meeting slides and videos. The overall meeting was recorded and the individual keynote and lightning talks have been edited down and released on YouTube, the EFI webpage, and Twitter. In addition, EFI2019 participants suggested dropping EFI’s existing discussion board (which participants were encouraged to use as part of meeting prep) and replacing it with a Slack channel, which has seen substantially greater use. The EFI organizing committee is also close to finalizing an Organizing Principles and Procedures document which establishes the obligations and benefits of EFI membership and lays out the operations of the EFI Steering Committee and committee chair. The OPP is currently being reviewed by legal counsel and we anticipate holding our first elections shortly after the new year.

Finally, we are happy to pass on that the NSF Science Technology Preproposal that was submitted shortly after the EFI2019 meeting has been selected to submit a full center proposal in January.

Predicting Nature to improve environmental management: How close are we and how do we get there?

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Original Date: October 17, 2019; Updated: October 22, 2019

Melissa Kenney from the University of Minnesota presented in the John Wesley Powell Center for Analysis and Synthesis 2019 Seminar Series.

A recording of Melissa’s presentation can be found here: https://my.usgs.gov/confluence/display/PowellCenterAdmin/Powell+Center+Seminar+Series+2019

2019 Seminar Series

All seminars are presented online at: zoom.us/j/663855534

Predicting Nature to improve environmental management: How close are we and how do we get there?

When: Monday, October 21st, 11am MT/1pm ET

Presented by: Melissa Kenney – University of Minnesota

Dr. Melissa A. Kenney is an environmental decision scientist with expertise in multidisciplinary, team-based science approaches to solving sustainability challenges. Her research program broadly addresses how to integrate both scientific knowledge and societal values into policy decision-making under uncertainty. Dr. Kenney is also the Associate Director of Knowledge Initiatives at the University of Minnesota’s Institue on the Environment where she directs efforts to build synergy across IonE’s broad scientific research portfolio. She earned a Ph.D. from Duke University, focused on integrating water quality and decision models.

Powell Center Working Group: Operationalizing Ecological Forecasts