INTRODUCTION TO VERA, THE VIRGINIA ECOFORECAST RESERVOIR ANALYSIS: A NEW FRESHWATER ECOSYSTEM FORECASTING CHALLENGE

As part of the new Virginia Reservoirs Long-Term Research in Environmental Biology (LTREB) program, our team has launched VERA, the Virginia Ecoforecast Reservoir Analysis. VERA is an open forecasting challenge to predict a suite of physical, chemical, and biological variables at two drinking water supply reservoirs before the data are collected. VERA is integrated with the Virginia Reservoirs LTREB state-of-the-art field monitoring program, which serves as a testbed for developing new approaches for data collection, access, and publishing. Our goal is to use forecasts to identify the fundamental predictability of a range of reservoir variables, spanning A (algae) to Z (zooplankton). The forecast guidelines and cyberinfrastructure are based on the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) Ecological Forecasting Challenge, with the inclusion of many additional freshwater variables. Participants are welcome to use any modeling approach to forecast any (or all!) of the variables in the VERA Challenge. To date, we have collected >1800 forecasts submitted to VERA for 25 variables, which has 10+ years of data available for model development in the Environmental Data Initiative repository, with more data made available every day in near-real time. At our website, we provide the challenge’s guidelines and forecast submission templates, a dashboard that shows the performance of forecast models in near-real time, and additional resources to learn more about VERA. We invite you to explore our datasets and submit forecasts to the VERA Challenge!

Primary Presenter: Cayelan Carey, Virginia Tech (cayelan@vt.edu)

Authors:

R. Quinn Thomas, Virginia Tech  (rqthomas@vt.edu)

Adrienne Breef-Pilz, Virginia Tech  (abreefpilz@vt.edu)

Austin Delany, Virginia Tech  (addelany@vt.edu)

Kathryn Hoffman, Virginia Tech  (kkhoffman@vt.edu)

Dexter Howard, Virginia Tech  (dwh1998@vt.edu)

Abigail Lewis, Virginia Tech  (aslewis@vt.edu)

Mary Lofton, Virginia Tech  (melofton@vt.edu)

Freya Olsson, Virginia Tech  (freyao@vt.edu)

Heather Wander, Virginia Tech  (hwander@vt.edu)