Theory & Synthesis | Ecological Forecasting Initiative

Overview of the Theory Group

Is nature predictable? Looking broadly across ecological subdisciplines, are there common patterns to what limits the predictability of different types of problems? Answering many of the deep, overarching questions in ecology requires us to develop new theory about predictability itself. It also requires synthesis across a small but rapidly growing catalog of ecological forecasts. Finally, forecasting itself is inherently synthetic, as making specific, quantitative predictions requires the fusion of our prior data and our current theories (as embedded in the models we use). Prediction provides a means of unification by assessing our ability to extrapolate not just within individual problems but across them; it implies we understand something general about how ecological systems work. These are the big-picture problems the EFI Theory & Synthesis working group aims to tackle.

Theory Working Group Schedule of Calls:
The Theory Group will meet on Mondays at 11 am US ET on January 12, February 9, March 9, April 13, May 11. A new schedule of calls will be created for June to August 2026. We are always open to people joining the calls, contact us at eco4cast.initiative@gmail.com.

Theory Resources

February 27, 2025, Blog Post jointly written with Education & Theory working group members: Resources for Reviewing Code, https://ecoforecast.org/resources-for-reviewing-code/

The Theory Working Group paper, “The Power of Forecasts to Advance Ecological Theory” came out Methods in Ecology and Evolution in August 2022.

The Theory group is working on creating models for submitting forecasts to all the themes in the NEON Forecasting Challenge. During the April 2023 call, Caleb Robbins (Baylor University) shared how to use the tidymodels framework in R which is useful for creating Machine Learning models for forecasts.

Amanda Gallinat’s overview of the Theory Group’s activities for the EFI 2022 Conference held May 23-25, 2022.

Notes from Working Group Calls
Co-chairs: Abby Lewis (Virginia Tech), Shubhi Sharma (Yale University)
Former co-chairs: Amanda Gallinat (University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee), Peter Adler (Utah State University)