Announcing RCN FORECAST Conference in 2012: New Perspectives on Data Assimilation in Global Change Science. October 9-11, 2012 in Woods Hole, MA, USA http://ecolab.ou.edu/?conferencedescription
The FORECAST (Forecasts Of Resource and Environmental Changes: Data Assimilation Science and Technology) initiative, a Research Coordination Network (RCN) funded by the National Science Foundation, will host a conference on emerging modeling tools for global change research. The goals of the conference include i) broader dissemination of data assimilation (DA) methods that ecologists can use to address environmental challenges and ii) identification of ecological problems and research themes that can benefit from new or enhanced modeling and analysis tools. The field of ecology has been rapidly transformed to a data-rich scientific enterprise due to fast development and implementation of observation networks, such as NEON, FLUXNET, spaceborne remote sensing systems of MODIS, LANDSAT, and IKONOS, and the contribution of data from an enormous number of individual or small groups of investigators. There is an unprecedented demand to convert the raw data from those networks into meaningful ecological information products, with the aim of accelerating advances in our fundamental knowledge of ecological processes, testing ecological theory, forecasting changes in ecological services, educating teachers and students, and supporting decision making. An essential tool to assist the transformation of ecological research in this data-rich era is data assimilation (DA), which uses data to inform initial conditions and model parameters, thereby constraining a model during simulation to yield results that approximate reality as closely as possible. DA also can facilitate selection of alternative model structures; quantify uncertainties arising from observations, models, and their interactions; and design data collection plans for observatory networks or individual experiments. Nevertheless, DA may not improve model predictions when ecological processes are not well understood or never observed. This conference will discuss all aspects of DA techniques and applications. Interwoven with a few talks by prominent ecologists, this workshop focuses on new investigators (recent PhDs), recognizing the uneven opportunities for training in environmental science programs. Research applications will be shared through invited and contributed talks. Discussions will focus on topics that include (but are not limited to) application areas in A1) biogeochemical cycles, A2) biodiversity, A3) emerging infectious disease, and A4) animal movement and health, and crosscutting challenges that derive from C1) multiple data sources, C2) diverse scales of data and process, and C3) DA-assisted forecasting. We expect talks to build from case studies, but also speak to the broad challenges in data assimilation. We encourage submission of abstracts on all aspects of DA techniques and applications, especially from new investigators. From submitted abstracts, we will select 12 contributed talks to be mixed with invited talks on Crosscutting Challenges in various application areas. Breakout and poster sessions will provide opportunities for small group and person-to-person discussion to pursue particular topics, in the form of grant proposals and/or publications. The NSF RCN FORECAST grant will support some limited travel grants for speakers and participants, especially graduate students and post-docs. See http://ecolab.ou.edu/?conferencedescription for conference description, including list of confirmed speakers and abstract submission.
