NEON Workshop: Operationalizing Ecological Forecasts

Ecosystems are changing worldwide and critical decisions that affect ecosystem health and sustainability are being made every day. As ecologists, we have a responsibility to ensure that these decisions are made with access to the best available science. However, to bring this idea into practice, ecology needs to make a substantial leap forward towards becoming a more predictive science. Furthermore, even for basic, conceptual questions there is a lot to be gained by addressing problems from a forecasting perspective, with more frequent data-model comparisons helping to highlight misunderstandings and reframe long-standing questions. Ecological forecasting is occurring across a wide range of ecological sub-disciplines,...

Categories: Project; Tags: All Working Groups, Completed, Ecosystems, NEON

Iterative ecological forecasting: Needs, opportunities, and challenges

A fundamental environmental challenge facing humanity in the 21st century and beyond is predicting the impacts of global environmental change. This challenge is complicated by the fact that we live on a non-stationary, unreplicated planet that is rapidly moving outside the envelope of natural variability into an historical non-analog world. In other words, while the past helps inform us about how the world has worked, it may no longer be the relevant frame of reference for management, conservation, and sustainability. In this future world the two questions at the foundation of sustainability are “How are ecosystems and the services they provide going to change in the future?” and “How do human decisions affect this...

Categories: Publication; Types: Citation

Iterative near-term ecological forecasting: Needs, opportunities, and challenges

Abstract Two foundational questions about sustainability are “How are ecosystems and the services they provide going to change in the future?” and “How do human decisions affect these trajectories?” Answering these questions requires an ability to forecast ecological processes. Unfortunately, most ecological forecasts focus on centennial-scale climate responses, therefore neither meeting the needs of near-term (daily to decadal) environmental decision-making nor allowing comparison of specific, quantitative predictions to new observational data, one of the strongest tests of scientific theory. Near-term forecasts provide the opportunity to iteratively cycle between performing analyses and updating predictions in...

Categories: Publication; Types: Citation