The 2024 “Hacking Limnology” Workshop Series and Virtual Summit: Increasing Inclusion, Participation, and Representation in the Aquatic Sciences

Abstract

The 4^th Aquatic Ecosystem MOdeling Network—Junior (AEMON-J) Hacking Limnology Workshop and 5^th Virtual Summit: Incorporating Data Science and Open Science in the Aquatic Sciences (DSOS) convened 15–19 July 2024. During the week, these joint communities engaged in activities at the intersection of big data, open science, modeling, remote sensing, and the aquatic sciences. The weeklong event, with over 100 aquatic science practitioners and enthusiasts, followed a similar structure to previous years, comprising three days of workshops followed by two days of the virtual summit (Meyer and Zwart 2020; Meyer et al. 2021b, 2022, 2023).

As in previous years, accessibility for a global audience was a top priority. Both events had no registration fees, thereby enabling broad participation. All recordings and workshop materials were made freely available on the Open Science Framework (OSF) archive (Meyer et al. 2021a) (https://osf.io/682v5/) for asynchronous viewing and access following the event. Relative to the 60 countries represented annually in the 2021, 2022, and 2023 workshops and summits (Meyer et al. 2021b, 2022, 2023), the 2024 workshop and summit experienced an expansion in global representation, with the majority of registrants from newly represented countries such as Nepal and Colombia. All registrants together represented more than 70 countries. With over 600 registrants worldwide, the most represented countries included the United States (30.5% of registrants), Nigeria (10.9%), Canada (9.1%), Germany (5.8%), and Nepal (4.5%). Notably, the 2024 Workshops and Summit had the lowest proportional representation from the United States in comparison to the previous summits (Fig. 1) and was the first year with two countries in Asia being in the top 10 based on the number of registrants (Nepal and India; Table 1). With respect to career-stage, most participants identified as being in early-career positions (i.e., graduate students and post-doctoral researchers; ~50%), as in previous years (Meyer et al. 2023).

This year's “Hacking Limnology” Workshop series featured three consecutive days of workshops. For each day, the workshop included a short, prerecorded introduction that attendees could watch prior to attending, a 45-minute keynote talk followed by a live question-and-answer session, two hours for the hands-on workshop portion, and finally one hour of breakout and working groups to discuss next steps and potential collaborations. All three workshops allowed for hands-on coding; the first and third workshops were in R (R Core Team 2024), and the second was in Python (Python Software Foundation 2024). The workshops were recorded so they could be watched asynchronously by the large number of international attendees living in different time zones. Following the workshops, all introductory materials, keynote talks, scripts, and workshop recordings were made publicly available on the OSF archive (Meyer et al. 2021a) (https://osf.io/682v5/).

The focus of the first workshop was the Inter-Sectoral Impact Model Intercomparison Project (ISIMIP). ISIMIP is an international modeling initiative that quantifies climate change impacts using earth system models across different sectors and spatial scales, that is, lakes, under different climate change scenarios (Golub et al. 2022). The second workshop centered around remote sensing data from the Surface Water Ocean Topography (SWOT) satellite (Biancamaria et al. 2016). The third workshop focused on Ordinary Differential Equation-based ecological modeling using the “rodeo” R package (Kneis et al. 2017). Each day of the workshop was well attended (up to 110 people), and engagement remained high throughout each day. Several people participated in the postworkshop breakout and working group meetings as well.

Because DSOS operated independently for one year prior to joining forces with AEMON-J, the 2024 Virtual Summit marks the fifth year of DSOS Virtual Summits. As in previous years, the summit consisted of a wide range of presenters, including sessions related to big data, data-intensive models, climate change, and applications of open science. Each session consisted of three to four presenters, where each presenter prepared a 10-minute, prerecorded video of their presentation, which was streamed live during the summit. Presentations spanned a range of topics, including building crowdsourced zooplankton datasets, forecasting ecosystem function over a range of climate scenarios, creating accessible data visualizations for wide audiences, and organizing grassroots communities for expanding open science. As with previous summits, all question-and-answer sessions were live following the streaming of all presentations, where questions were submitted in a written format and presenters could access the questions in real time for better preparation. Questions and answers revolved around a suite of themes, including how to avoid “parachute science” (Barber et al. 2014), how to develop grassroots data harmonization efforts, and how to best work with complex spatiotemporal datasets for modeling purposes.

In addition to recorded scientific presentations, the summit also hosted a career panel. This year's panel focused on career paths in industry settings, with panelists from corporations, consulting companies, and start-ups. Panelists included Kate Fickas (Esri), Arik Tashie (ClimateAI), Kateri Salk (TetraTech), Leslie Smith (Your Ocean Consulting, LLC), and Tung Nguyen (Jacobs Solutions, Inc). In their discussion, many of the panelists focused on translating science products into a portfolio that could be shared and presented to a range of industry settings. Moreover, panelists emphasized the pervasiveness of imposter syndrome, the need to recognize differences in “experience thresholds” across job sectors, and the importance of marketing your skills to hiring managers.

As with years prior, the 2024 “Hacking Limnology” Workshops and Virtual Summit attracted wide attention from researchers across various career stages, experiences, and locations. Though the format was comparable to previous events, the content has expanded to more inclusively represent the researchers and themes in the nexus of data science, open science, and the aquatic sciences. The ever-popular remote sensing content has expanded from optical to radar and altimetry remote sensing. Big data conversations have expanded from -omics and high-frequency monitoring to include community composition and function databases. Numerical modeling efforts upscaled from local site studies to global climate change assessments. Discussions of career trajectories in data science and open science have arced across a spectrum from academia to government to industry settings. In short, the past 4 years of workshops and 5 year of summits have remained as dynamic as the science that they communicate, and the representation of presenters, panelists, and organizational team members has likewise expanded to showcase and connect the diversity of people engaging in this science (Tables 2 and 3).

The fourth joint “Hacking Limnology” Workshop Series and DSOS Virtual Summit also provided an opportunity to look back on the successes and challenges of the prior half decade of summits. Meyer and Zwart (2020) highlighted how the inaugural Virtual Summit created an opportunity for a wide community to participate and network in the data-intensive aquatic sciences but had definite needs for improvement in speaker representation. Although an ever-increasing ease in conducting science virtually has enabled for the summits to run more smoothly, the most noticeable improvement for the summits has been the representation of speakers and those involved in the community. Although the first summit strove for diverse representation, the finalized speaker list fell short of those goals. Meyer and Zwart (2020) suggested that more diverse speaker representation could be achieved through inviting speakers further in advance of the summit, creating opportunities for panels, and intentionally focusing on soliciting speakers from a range of backgrounds. Since 2020, the workshops and summits have grown to include speakers and organizers of numerous backgrounds, identities, and experiences (Tables 2 and 3). Likely as a result of our intentional focus on increasing representation, the reach of AEMON-J and DSOS beyond a primarily North American audience has also grown. Although earlier summits had higher synchronous participation (~120–160 people), the previous 3 years have maintained high registration (457–684 people) and synchronous attendance (40–140 people). While opportunity abounds to improve on these foundations, the organizing team is enthusiastic about the overwhelming positive responses the workshops and summits have received.

With the growth of data-intensive aquatic science, the organizational team is confident that we have identified a needed space where modelers from numerical, machine learning, and statistical backgrounds can converge, discuss, and share experiences centered on data science and open science topics (Meyer and Zwart 2020). The scale, scope, pace, and dynamism of this workshop and virtual summit are reflections of the interest in this nexus, and we look forward to seeing how it grows in the future.

Michael F. Meyer is an associate editor at Limnology & Oceanography Bulletin. Carolina C. Barbosa is a former associate editor at Limnology & Oceanography Bulletin.