ecoforecast-africa/efi_course_2025

Repo for content of the EFI course run in Cape Town in July 2025 # Near-term ecological forecasting course 2025 This repo contains contents of the ecological forecasting short course run by the Ecoforecast Africa chapter of the Ecological Forecasting Initiative in Cape Town 21-25th July 2025. The goal of the course is to equip participants with the ability to generate a forecast from a simple model that makes use of more than one data stream. You should be able to categorize and estimate the uncertainties in the model, propagate this uncertainty into the forecast, and assess the performance of the model. You should be able to assess and critique forecast data products and scientific publications about ecological forecasts, and understand how such forecasts can be used to inform decision making. The full syllabus with timetable, setup instructions etc is available here. All lectures will be made available in the `lectures` folder of this repository. Lectures include: 1. Why forecast? 2. Forecast Infrastructure 3. Intro to Bayes 4. Expert Elicitation 5. Characterizing Uncertainty 6. Hierarchical Bayes 7. State Space Models 8. Dynamic Models and Bonus Content 9. Projection and Decision Support 10. Propagating Uncertainty 11. Analytical Data Assimilation 12. Ensemble Data Assimilation 13. Model Assessment The course includes hands-on activities, which can be accessed here. Participants will also partake in group projects based on one of the following themes (see links for separate git repositories for each project): - Predicting stream flow and flood events in the Jonkershoek catchments - Predicting carbon and water fluxes from eddy-covariance - Predicting waterbird population abundance from count data