Environmental Tipping Points & Transformations
When: May 28-30, 2025
Where: This is an in-person event located at the SEEC building on the University of Colorado Boulder’s East Campus in Boulder, Colorado.
Applications are open! Please complete this application by January 31, 2025.
The 2025 ESIIL Innovation Summit will focus on environmental tipping points and transformations, bringing together scientists, policymakers, data analysts, and other thought leaders to address some of the most urgent environmental challenges of our time. As multiple drivers of environmental change—such as climate change, land conversions, and altered disturbance regimes—continue to push ecosystems toward critical thresholds, we find ourselves facing environmental transformations that can have profound, often irreversible, impacts.
These tipping points—also known as state changes, regime shifts, or type conversions—can occur gradually or suddenly, at varying scales, and significantly alter the ecosystems that sustain life on Earth. Understanding these past and future transformations, and the social, cultural, and ecological contexts that shape them, is critical for predicting, managing, and mitigating their impacts on both nature and society.
The 2025 Summit will offer a unique, data-driven opportunity to explore environmental tipping points and transformations through big data. You will work alongside a diverse group of peers to identify and understand the factors driving these changes and advance data-informed strategies for responding to them in ways that are socially and ecologically resilient.
Goals
The goals of the 2025 ESIIL Innovation Summit are to:
- Explore big data to understand environmental tipping points and transformations by identifying data synthesis opportunities and utilizing ESIIL cloud-compute capabilities.
- Promote best practices in ethical, open science by supporting accessibility and usability of environmental data by all stakeholders.
- Champion ethical and equitable practices in environmental science by honoring data sovereignty, addressing bias, and encouraging the responsible use of AI.
- Support diverse and inclusive teams by establishing collaborations around data-inspired themes across different disciplines, sectors, career stages, backgrounds, and ways of knowing.
Applications are open! Please complete this application by January 31, 2025.
Please visit our event website for more information: https://cu-esiil.github.io/Innovation-Summit-2025/.
Past Innovation Summits
2024 Innovation Summit: Big Data for Environmental Resilience and Adaptation
May 14th-16th, 2024
University of Colorado Boulder
ESIIL's 2024 Innovation Summit offered an opportunity to use big data to understand resilience across genes, species, ecosystems and societies, advance ecological forecasting with solutions in mind, and inform adaptive management and natural climate solutions. The Summit supported attendees to advance data-informed courses of action for resilience and adaptation in the face of our changing environment. This in-person ‘unconference’, enables participants to dynamically work on themes that most inspire them, with inclusive physical and intellectual spaces for working together. Over two and a half days participants worked in teams to explore research questions using open science approaches, including: data infrastructure, artificial intelligence (AI) and novel analytics, and cloud computing. Participants were encouraged to work across and respect different perspectives, with the aim of co-developing resilience solutions. ESIIL provided participants with opportunities to learn more about cultural intelligence, ethical and open science practices, and leadership in the rapidly evolving field of environmental data science. Overall, the Summit capitalized on the combination of open data and analytics opportunities to develop innovative or impactful approaches that improve environmental resilience and adaptation.
Why Big Data for Environmental Resilience and Adaptation?
Humans have vastly altered ecosystems, leading to habitat and biodiversity loss, climate change, and altered nutrient and water cycles. At the same time, we are in an unprecedented moment where vast amounts of data are being produced about our planet faster than we can generate insights in a responsible way. We urgently need solutions that foster equitable use of our planet’s resources and better distribute the burden of adaptation.
The goals of the 2024 ESIIL Innovation Summit:
- Explore big data for environmental resilience and adaptation by identifying data synthesis opportunities and utilizing ESIIL cloud-compute capabilities.
- Promote best practices in ethical, open science, by supporting accessibility and usability of environmental data by all stakeholders. Champion ethical and equitable practices in environmental science, honoring data sovereignty and encouraging the responsible use of AI.
- Support diverse and inclusive teams by establishing collaborations around data-inspired themes across different disciplines, sectors, career stages, and backgrounds.
- Encourage the co-production of environmental knowledge with communities that are experiencing significant environmental challenges.
The Summit brought together participants who are interested in exploring the potential of big data to increase our understanding of environmental adaptation and resilience by identifying data synthesis opportunities, exploring ESIIL CI capabilities, and cultivating innovative ideas by building diverse and inclusive teams.
Here is our 2024 Innovation Summit Agenda.
2023 Innovation Summit
Over 175 participants attended our 2023 Innovation Summit from across the globe including a diverse range of institutions and organizations, from universities to governmental agencies, tech companies to research institutions, and more. Participants were divided into 16 breakout groups to connect with each other & begin working on current EDS topics and issues.
The goals of the 2023 Innovation Summit were to:
- Define a decadal research agenda for the growing field of environmental data science by articulating the most pressing environmental challenges and opportunities for solutions-oriented science, and by bridging environmental and biological sciences, social sciences, and data and computational sciences
- Build a diverse and inclusive ESIIL Network by establishing collaborations with others from different disciplines, sectors, career stages, and backgrounds around research themes of interest
If you have any questions about past Innovation Summits or have ideas for the 2025 Innovation Summit, please contact esiil@colorado.edu.