Counting marmots…
Effectively responding to rapid global change will require precise, accurate predictions of how ecological systems will respond. However, our current methods for modeling the performance of individuals, populations, and species are optimized to explain observed data rather than to predict future change. We will develop an ecological forecasting platform to predict the near-term population trajectories, using the long-lived plant Valeriana edulis . We will use this platform to (i) determine the forcastability & forecast limits for key metrics of individual and population performance, (ii) hone the forecast skill of models by learning from forecast errors, and (iii) measure the ability of sparse local data to predict landscape-scale patterns in plant performance.