A community convention for ecological forecasting: output files and metadata
Files
First author draft
Date
Authors
Dietze, Michael
Thomas, R. Quinn
Peters, Jody
Boettiger, Carl
Shiklomanov, Alexey N.
Ashander, Jaime
Version
First author draft
OA Version
Citation
M. Dietze, R.Q. Thomas, J. Peters, C. Boettiger, A.N. Shiklomanov, J. Ashander. "A Community Convention for Ecological Forecasting: Output Files and Metadata." https://doi.org/10.32942/osf.io/9dgtq
Abstract
This document summarizes the open community standards developed by the Ecological Forecasting Initiative (EFI) for the common formatting and archiving of ecological forecasts and the metadata associated with these forecasts. Such open standards are intended to promote interoperability and facilitate forecast adoption, distribution, validation, and synthesis. For output files EFI has adopted a three-tiered approach reflecting trade-offs in forecast data volume and technical expertise. The preferred output file format is netCDF following the Climate and Forecast Convention for dimensions and variable naming, including an ensemble dimension where appropriate. The second-tier option is a semi-long CSV format, with state variables as columns and each row representing a unique issue date time, prediction date time, location, ensemble member, etc. The third-tier option is similar to option 2, but each row represents a specific summary statistic (mean, upper/lower CI) rather than individual ensemble members. For metadata, EFI expands upon the Ecological Metadata Language (EML), using additional Metadata tags to store information designed to facilitate cross-forecast synthesis (e.g. uncertainty propagation, data assimilation, model complexity) and setting a subset of base EML tags (e.g. temporal resolution, output variables) to be required. To facilitate community adoption we also provides a R package containing a number of vignettes on how to both write and read in the EFI standard, as well as a metadata validator tool.
Description
License
This preprint is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 4.0 license (CC-By Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International). Replace citation: Dietze, M., Thomas, R. Q., Peters, J., Boettiger, C., Shiklomanov, A. N., & Ashander, J. (2021, May 27). A Community Convention for Ecological Forecasting: Output Files and Metadata. https://doi.org/10.32942/osf.io/9dgtq