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, but there is often insufficient communication and cross-fertilization of ideas and best practices. In particular, with the growth in environmental and ecological monitoring data, there is an enormous unmet potential to develop near real-time ecological forecasts - to use monitoring data not just respond to changing ecosystems, but to anticipate that change.

This workshop aims to advance this idea of "operational" ecological forecasting and will focus on identifying:

• In what ecological subdisciplines, and for what problems, would operational forecasts be most immediately useful?
• What are the low-hanging fruit for using NEON and other monitoring data to build operational forecasts?
• What are the hurdles to getting this done (theory, training, collaboration, technology, funding) and how might they be addressed?