Community-Developed Cyberinfrastructure for Efficient Ecological Forecasting (Core Science Keynote)

Societal demands for ecological forecasts have increased as more decision makers and natural resource managers incorporate aspects of ecosystem services into management frameworks for various sectors. These forecasts require cyberinfrastructure (CI) to generate predictions for a range of variables and from points to regions and from minutes to decades. However, the current status quo of developing and maintaining many boutique CI solutions for forecasting projects is at best inefficient. Moreover, because CI development represents a nontrivial barrier to entry, a lack of common CI design principles is potentially excluding many researchers and organizations from producing ecological forecasts and advancing our collective understanding of ecological phenomenon and effectively managing ecological systems. To this end, we hosted a workshop in April 2024 composed of researchers and CI experts across government agencies, academia, private sector, and non-governmental organizations to 1) apply Design Justice principles to forecast CI, 2) collate common CI practices across existing forecasting projects, 3) synthesize barriers and challenges for creating CI, and 4) propose implementation strategies across a variety of organizations. In this presentation, we will highlight the outcomes and recommendations of this workshop and welcome community feedback and engagement on a common forecast CI design in hopes of serving a broad forecasting community across a range of prediction problems.