About

Welcome to EFI Asia!

This is the Asian chapter (A-EFI) of the Ecological Forecasting Initiative, an international grassroots consortium aimed at building and supporting an interdisciplinary community of practice around near-term (daily to decadal) ecological forecasts. As a regional chapter, A-EFI benefits from the collective progress and resources of the global EFI community while maintaining autonomy to focus on ecological forecasting topics, data streams, and policies specific to Asia.

Please join us to receive updates on our activities and events.

Co-chairs

Meghna Krishnadas (National Centre for Biological Sciences)
Krishna Anujan (Smithsonian Institution)
Patricia Dumandan (Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences)

Our Vision

Our vision is to forecast the response of species, assemblages and ecosystems to global environmental changes, using a bottom-up, theory-based, data-driven approach to provide a platform for knowledge generation, information exchange, and syntheses that improves the understanding and management of ecosystems.

Why Asian EFI?

Biodiversity and ecosystems face unprecedented threats moving into an uncertain future. This brings an urgent imperative to forecast how species, communities, and systems will respond to the multi-pronged challenges of global environment changes. With human modification of earth’s ecosystems and ecological processes, there is a surge of interest in developing reliable predictions of ecological responses and outcomes. Such efforts have already gained momentum in western Europe and the USA as the Ecological Forecasting Initiative, with researchers from Africa and Oceania also joining recently. However, in Asia, a region with one of the fastest rates of economic and urban development that overlap with highly diverse ecosystems, there is a striking lack of focused efforts at ecological forecasting.

Institutionalizing an Asian Ecological Forecasting Initiative (A-EFI) chapter can help fill gaps in geographical representation of scientists (Members map) and research themes (Lewis et al. 2022 Fig 3). The Asian EFI chapter will serve as a hub for ecologists, practitioners, and others interested in conceptualizing, prioritizing, and operationalizing ecological forecasting in Asian countries. By setting up an Asian EFI Chapter, we hope to have a platform for groups based in Asia to congregate, develop, and implement research activities aligned with EFI’s central mission of creating and using ecological forecasts while relevant to local contexts and priorities. Finally, we hope that the establishment of an Asian EFI Chapter will motivate and encourage researchers across a broad range of disciplines and career stages to develop stronger collaborations to enhance our ability to forecast ecological change in Asia.

Note

We will update this page to include information on planned activities as we grow our membership and research efforts.

For more information on ecological forecasting, watch the short video (4 minutes) below or read Dietze et al. 2018 PNAS.