NEON and the Ecological Forecasting Initiative: Creating data, standards, and community

Background/Question/Methods

The National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) is a rich resource for free, open datasets that support ecological forecasting. NEON provides a broad set of data products from terrestrial and freshwater ecosystems on a regular schedule, including common driver data (e.g., meteorological) as well as daily to annual measurements of response data (e.g., organismal composition and diversity, disease prevalence, water quality). NEON data are collected by in situ and airborne instruments, as well as human observations. As they are collected and published on a consistent schedule, are put though well documented and rigorous quality assurance and checking processes, and are readily available through an application programming interface, NEON data are well poised to serve the ecological forecasting community.

Results/Conclusions

The Ecological Forecasting Initiative (EFI) provides an unparalleled opportunity to explore the data landscape and build or fine-tune models of ecological change. By integrating with the current and future forecasting community, NEON has the opportunity to better understand the needs of the community and join in the conversation about new standards around which forecasting models and outputs are documented and managed. In this talk, we’ll highlight how NEON has partnered with EFI, how NEON data have been used to date in forecasting, and how the standards for models and outputs are evolving in response.