ESIIL Hackathon 2023 Evaluation Report

The Environmental Data Science Innovation and Inclusion Lab (ESIIL, www.esiil.org) serves as a data science 
center of excellence and synthesis center that facilitates collaboration across large, diverse teams through the 
ESIIL Network. ESIIL brings together a diverse community of environmental and biological data scientists to 
turn environmental and biological data into actionable understanding and knowledge toward a more 
sustainable society. The center activities support ESIIL’s mission: “Empower an inclusive and diverse 
community to accelerate continental-scale environmental data science (EDS)”. 

This report summarizes the evaluation feedback on the 2023 ESIIL Hackathon event. The Hackathon is an 
annual event that aims to address science and application topics identified through the ESIIL Innovation 
Summit with hands-on, collaborative, and transdisciplinary Environmental Data Science (EDS) work. Each 
Hackathon event focuses on a key data-science challenge that utilizes a companion, curated data cube with 
relevant data layers from field, airborne, and satellite sources developed by the ESIIL analytics team. Code 
developed during the Hackathon will create open, reproducible workflows needed for further refinement into 
data tools for integration into the ESIIL cyberinfrastructure and for use by the ESIIL Network. The Hackathon 
aims to bring together people from diverse backgrounds and fields of study and move the field of EDS forward 
and continue to build the ESIIL community and ESIIL network.