ESSIC associate research professor Melissa Kenney co-authored an article about ecological publishing in the February 2018 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). The article posits that ecological prediction models are not progressing fast enough to meet the needs of policymakers who require this information to make critical decisions. The authors note that most of the existing models have a 100-year time resolution and this prevents sufficient validation by observations. Ecological forecasting models will improve, just like weather models did, if they forecast on daily to decadal time scales, the article says.
![Satellite seasonal temperature difference maps indicate how the Chesapeake Bay ecosystem and its organisms may respond to the temperature changes. Here, the maps show warmer than average water temperatures from January through March 2020, cooler than average from April through June, near average July through September, and slightly warmer than average October through December. The long-term baseline is from the years 2008-2019.]](https://essic.umd.edu/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/rv-chesapeake2-150x150.jpg)