Ecological Projection Analytic Collaborative Framework (EcoPro)

In this time of global heating and rapid climate change, Earth's ecosystems are under great stress for their survival and Earth's biodiversity is being rapidly reduced and widely redistributed. Despite the importance of biodiversity for humanity and the imminent nature of the threat, efforts to project these losses over the coming decades remain crude, especially contrasted with other processes of global importance such as relative sea level rise. As a discipline, ecological projection is still in its early stages, and will become increasingly important as stress drivers increase and losses mount. A systematic framework, that includes advanced data science tools that are vetted and refined iteratively during application to multiple use cases, will accelerate progress. Following the 2017 Earth Science Decadal Survey, NASA has made biodiversity a priority. This is reflected in ongoing and upcoming missions, e.g., ECOSTRESS, UAVSAR, NISAR, PACE, and SBG. In the next few years, these biodiversity remote sensing missions will create, improve, and lengthen high-resolution records of changing environmental variables and indicators for ecological systems. This provides a unique and well-timed opportunity to advance ecological projection on multi-decadal timescales, as well as ecological forecasting on shorter timescales. We propose to build Ecological Projection Analytic Collaborative Framework (EcoPro) to support multidisciplinary teams to conduct ecological projection studies, collaborations, applications, and new observation strategy developments. EcoPro will contain (1) an analytic toolkit to perform the multidisciplinary analyses, (2) a data gateway to organize, store, and access key input and output datasets, and (3) a web portal to publish and visualize the results of the studies and to provide a virtual collaborative work space. The project aims to achieve the following three outcomes by building and applying EcoPro to the ecological projection and forecasting. Outcome 1: Perform scientific studies to demonstrate the scientific use of EcoPro. Giant sequoias forests, giant kelp forests, and coral reefs will be used as case studies. They are important local ecosystems threatened by climate change. The case studies will demonstrate the sufficiency of EcoPro Analytic Toolkit for ecological projection studies. Outcome 2: Generate application-usable datasets and visualize them to demonstrate the application use of EcoPro. Climate stressor variables and habitability and mortality indicators of our three case-study ecosystems will be generated and visualized for the use by the application community (e.g., conservation managers from the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, the California Ocean Protection Council, the National Park Service, the US Forest Service, NOAA Coral Reef Conservation Program, the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority). This will demonstrate the sufficiency of EcoPro Web Portal for sharing and visualizing the ecological projection datasets with the application community. In particular, we plan to transition and infuse EcoPro to the SBG Application Working Group in the optional third year. Outcome 3: Conduct experimental studies to demonstrate the New Observing Strategies (NOS) use of EcoPro. We will experiment with different resolutions of predictor observations to quantify the adequacy of the observation datasets used in generating and validating ecological projection datasets. This will lead to new observation requests to existing observing systems or new observation requirements for future mission formulations. In the optional third year, we plan to transition and infuse EcoPro to the SBG Science Team to support assessment of data sufficiency of SBG products and formulation of complementary missions.

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