New center showcases Virginia Tech's strengths in global sustainability

Cayelan Carey and Quinn Thomas had been leading and conducting separate efforts to counter the effects of climate change, land use, and other pollution for years. 

But when they combined their individual expertise in 2018, they flipped the script and began thinking about how to get in front of global warming, rather than chasing the destruction left in its wake.

Today, as co-directors of the newly established Virginia Tech Center for Ecosystem Forecasting, the duo is not only striving to get ahead of ecological hazards, but is also broadly extending efforts to encompass partners both home and abroad. 

“Moving forward, we need to address these critical challenges facing humanity by reaching out to partners across the globe, yet at the same time engaging the decision-makers and stakeholders as this new center is already doing,” Dan Sui, senior vice president and chief research and innovation officer, said at the center’s launch last month.

Uniquely positioned for its depth of research, innovative software, global partnerships and engagement, as well as its extensive education and training opportunities, the center combines Carey’s extensive research with lakes and reservoirs throughout the globe and Thomas’s technical innovation and data science research with Virginia Tech’s land-grant mission to serve. It already has affiliated faculty from multiple departments and colleges across the university and international prominence, demonstrated by the recent award of a National Science Foundation Global Center planning grant. 

“This is exactly the kind of thing that completely aligns with our campus priorities – tapping into the excellence and expertise of our faculty to make our communities more sustainable and providing our students opportunities to get involved in hands-on research,” said Kevin Pitts, dean of the College of Science, which is the center’s administrative home.

Fresh beginnings

Similar to how meteorologists forecast weather, ecological forecasters collect and analyze environmental data, build and share ecological models and software, create and assess a diversity of forecasting methods, and then translate and communicate forecasts for end-user decision support.

Carey, professor in biological sciences, and Thomas, associate professor of forest resources and environmental conservation, began forecasting freshwater ecosystems in a partnership with the Western Virginia Water Authority in 2018. By co-developing forecast tools and visualizations with the water managers, the center has been able to supplement the existing operational guidelines used by the Western Virginia Water Authority with research-based insights to help provide the public with safe drinking water. 

With warming air temperatures and other pollution, many freshwater ecosystems globally have increasingly exhibited greater variability and degradation, which is exemplified by toxic phytoplankton blooms, unsafe concentrations of nutrients and contaminants, fish kills, and anoxia, or low oxygen levels. These effects make lake and reservoir water harmful for swimming and fisheries. 

To preempt this degradation before it starts in Southwest Virginia reservoirs, Thomas and Carey developed a state-of-the art forecasting system to deliver daily forecasts and inform the water managers of future water quality conditions. This enables them to anticipate and mitigate the effects and provide optimal water quality by various means, including diverting water from other reservoirs, adding chemicals to curb toxic blooms, issuing swimming and fishery advisories, and increasing water flows to prevent anoxia. 

The center's team members are firmly established as freshwater ecosystem forecasting experts. In addition to developing daily forecasts for managers in Virginia, they are generating daily forecasts for lakes across the U.S. from Alaska to Florida and have partnered with a lake association in New Hampshire that has sponsored student exchanges for the past three years. To date, they have received 10 federal grants totaling over $6 million to develop freshwater ecosystem forecasts for lakes and reservoirs around the world. 

The center’s forecasting approaches transcend freshwater lakes and reservoirs and are widely applicable to all ecosystems experiencing rapid changes in response to altered climate and land use. Thomas leads the National Ecological Observatory Network Ecological Forecasting Challenge, which is a continental-scale forecasting challenge spanning 81 sites across the United States. For this project, the center team collaborates with other researchers at Virginia Tech and other universities to actively develop forecasts to estimate future carbon sequestration, vector-borne diseases, tick populations, and beetle diversity using similar methods as those used for freshwaters.

Global engagement

The center is connected with researchers across the globe. 

In 2022, Carey traveled to Australia as a Fulbright Future Scholar to work with researchers from the University of Western Australia who had developed an open-source lake and reservoir model for long-term simulations of historical conditions. Since then, Carey, Thomas, and several researchers in Australia have collaborated to create an upgraded software system that not only allows for daily forecasting, but also models the effects of human activities on drinking water quality. 

“This center is timely, as we are facing an ever increasing challenge to supply potable water to protect aquatic ecosystems and to support irrigated agriculture and other water-based economies,” Justin Brookes, head of school at the University of Adelaide, Australia, said at the official launch of the center. “Now we finally have the confluence of computing power, machine learning, process-based models, and the relationships that are necessary to significantly advance water management both here in America, in Australia, and globally.”

The center’s software is open-sourced, which not only promotes transparency but aids accessibility and encourages collaboration with scientists and managers across the world. End users, including water managers, students, and researchers, can access the constantly updating iterative data and models. 

“We are an action-oriented research center that develops and applies forecasts of ecosystem dynamics in partnership with managers, decision makers, and the public,” said Carey, a Roger Moore and Mojdeh Khatam-Moore Faculty Fellow in the Department of Biological Sciences and faculty affiliate with the Global Change Center and the Fralin Life Sciences Institute.

As founding members of the Ecological Forecasting Initiative and Global Lake Ecological Observatory Network, two international grassroots networks of interdisciplinary researchers who collaborate on shared open-source data, models, and software, the center’s team have developed relationships that enhance both the researchers’ work and that of their international colleagues.

Education and training

The center team has made the education and training of undergraduate and graduate students, researchers, and managers a priority for years. Alongside postdoctoral associate Mary Lofton, Carey and Thomas developed a series of hands-on teaching modules called Macrosystems EDDIE, which stands for Environmental Data-Driven Inquiry and Exploration. Since its creation in 2017, these modules have been implemented at over 40 universities across the world. 

“We’re excited to be a hub of activity focusing on a wide range of ecosystems at the intersection of data science and modeling, environmental sciences, decision sciences, and engineering,” said Thomas, a data science faculty fellow in the College of Science. “Please stay tuned for events that include training opportunities and distinguished campus visitors.”

Thomas, an affiliate faculty of the Global Change Center and the Fralin Life Sciences Institute, also teaches a new course called Ecological Modeling and Forecasting for Virginia Tech graduate students, and the center team additionally sponsors capstone projects for the computational modeling and data analytics majors at Virginia Tech.

Center's vision

The Virginia Tech Center for Ecosystem Forecasting aims to help fill the need for predictive insights to climate and other environmental change, which is a component of all major environmental centers and initiatives at the university. Fundamental in enabling knowledge transfer, the center will continue to provide an integral link among the environmental sciences, data sciences, statistics, decision sciences, computer science, and other disciplines. 

As a team of faculty, postdoctoral fellows, graduate students, a data scientist, a sensor technician, and a program manager, the center is prepared to tackle cutting-edge environmental problems that can be uniquely addressed at a university that values innovation and problem solving.

“By being at the vanguard of technology and method development, our goal is to use our position at a university to explore the limits of what ecosystem variables we can forecast reliably and deliver new ecosystem models, software, and decision support tools for a suite of partners,” Thomas said.

Supported by the College of Science, the College of Natural Resources and Environment, the Department of Forest Resources and Environmental Conservation, and the Fralin Life Sciences Institute and philanthropic support, the new Virginia Tech Center for Ecosystem Forecasting will continue to make an impact locally and globally.