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Abstract Ecosystems around the globe are experiencing changes in both the magnitude and fluctuations of environmental conditions due to land use and climate change. In response, ecologists are increasingly using near‐term, iterative ecological forecasts to predict how ecosystems will change in the future. To date, many near‐term, iterative forecasting systems have been developed using high temporal frequency (minute to hourly resolution) data streams for assimilation. However, this approach may be cost‐prohibitive or impossible for forecasting ecological variables that lack high‐frequency sensors or have high data latency (i.e., a delay before data are available for modeling after collection). To explore the effects of data assimilation frequency on forecast skill, we developed water temperature forecasts for a eutrophic drinking water reservoir and conducted data assimilation experiments by selectively withholding observations to examine the effect of data availability on forecast accuracy. We used in situ sensors, manually collected data, and a calibrated water quality ecosystem model driven by forecasted weather data to generate future water temperature forecasts using Forecasting Lake and Reservoir Ecosystems (FLARE), an open source water quality forecasting system. We tested the effect of daily, weekly, fortnightly, and monthly data assimilation on the skill of 1‐ to 35‐day‐ahead water temperature forecasts. We found that forecast skill varied depending on the season, forecast horizon, depth, and data assimilation frequency, but overall forecast performance was high, with a mean 1‐day‐ahead forecast root mean square error (RMSE) of 0.81°C, mean 7‐day RMSE of 1.15°C, and mean 35‐day RMSE of 1.94°C. Aggregated across the year, daily data assimilation yielded the most skillful forecasts at 1‐ to 7‐day‐ahead horizons, but weekly data assimilation resulted in the most skillful forecasts at 8‐ to 35‐day‐ahead horizons. Within a year, forecasts with weekly data assimilation consistently outperformed forecasts with daily data assimilation after the 8‐day forecast horizon during mixed spring/autumn periods and 5‐ to 14‐day‐ahead horizons during the summer‐stratified period, depending on depth. Our results suggest that lower frequency data (i.e., weekly) may be adequate for developing accurate forecasts in some applications, further enabling the development of forecasts broadly across ecosystems and ecological variables without high‐frequency sensor data.
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What can we learn from 100,000 freshwater forecasts? A synthesis from the NEON Ecological Forecasting Challenge
Abstract Near‐term, iterative ecological forecasts can be used to help understand and proactively manage ecosystems. To date, more forecasts have been developed for aquatic ecosystems than other ecosystems worldwide, likely motivated by the pressing need to conserve these essential and threatened ecosystems and increasing the availability of high‐frequency data. Forecasters have implemented many different modeling approaches to forecast freshwater variables, which have demonstrated promise at individual sites. However, a comprehensive analysis of the performance of varying forecast models across multiple sites is needed to understand broader controls on forecast performance. Forecasting challenges (i.e., community‐scale efforts to generate forecasts while also developing shared software, training materials, and best practices) present a useful platform for bridging this gap to evaluate how a range of modeling methods perform across axes of space, time, and ecological systems. Here, we analyzed forecasts from the aquatics theme of the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) Forecasting Challenge hosted by the Ecological Forecasting Initiative. Over 100,000 probabilistic forecasts of water temperature and dissolved oxygen concentration for 1–30 days ahead across seven NEON‐monitored lakes were submitted in 2023. We assessed how forecast performance varied among models with different structures, covariates, and sources of uncertainty relative to baseline null models. A similar proportion of forecast models were skillful across both variables (34%–40%), although more individual models outperformed the baseline models in forecasting water temperature (10 models out of 29) than dissolved oxygen (6 models out of 15). These top performing models came from a range of classes and structures. For water temperature, we found that forecast skill degraded with increases in forecast horizons, process‐based models, and models that included air temperature as a covariate generally exhibited the highest forecast performance, and that the most skillful forecasts often accounted for more sources of uncertainty than the lower performing models. The most skillful forecasts were for sites where observations were most divergent from historical conditions (resulting in poor baseline model performance). Overall, the NEON Forecasting Challenge provides an exciting opportunity for a model intercomparison to learn about the relative strengths of a diverse suite of models and advance our understanding of freshwater ecosystem predictability.
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- PAR ID:
- 10571698
- Publisher / Repository:
- Wiley Blackwell (John Wiley & Sons)
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Ecological Applications
- Volume:
- 35
- Issue:
- 1
- ISSN:
- 1051-0761
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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