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A substantial increase in predictive capacity is needed to anticipate and mitigate the widespread change in ecosystems and their services in the face of climate and biodiversity crises. In this era of accelerating change, we cannot rely on historical patterns or focus primarily on long-term projections that extend decades into the future. In this Perspective, we discuss the potential of near-term (daily to decadal) iterative ecological forecasting to improve decision-making on actionable time frames. We summarize the current status of ecological forecasting and focus on how to scale up, build on lessons from weather forecasting, and take advantage of recent technological advances. We also highlight the need to focus on equity, workforce development, and broad cross-disciplinary and non-academic partnerships. 

Edge and fog computing encompass a variety of technologies that are poised to enable new applications across the Internet that support data capture, storage, processing, and communication across the networking continuum. These environments pose new challenges to the design and implementation of networks-as membership can be dynamic and devices are heterogeneous, widely distributed geographically, and in proximity to end-users, as is the case with mobile and Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices. We present a demonstration of EdgeVPN.io (Evio for short), an open-source programmable, software-defined network that addresses challenges in the deployment of virtual networks spanning distributed edge and cloud resources, in particular highlighting its use in support of the Kubernetes container orchestration middleware. The demo highlights a deployment of unmodified Kubernetes middleware across a virtual cluster comprising virtual machines deployed both in cloud providers, and in distinct networks at the edge-where all nodes are assigned private IP addresses and subject to different NAT (Network Address Translation) middleboxes, connected through an Evio virtual network. The demo includes an overview of the configuration of Kubernetes and Evio nodes and the deployment of Docker-based container pods, highlighting the seamless connectivity for TCP/IP applications deployed on the pods.