This summer marked the ninth consecutive year that the PEcAn Project participated in Google Summer of Code (GSoC). Over that time, 30 student-led projects have made significant contributions to PEcAn’s mission of advancing open, reproducible ecosystem modeling.

The 2025 cohort continued this tradition with three contributions that improve functionality and user experience.

2025 GSoC Projects​

Akash B V: Ensemble-based Uncertainty Propagation Workflows​

Akash developed ensemble-based data preparation workflows for soils, weather, and vegetation initial conditions. This work enables PEcAn’s ability to represent uncertainty in ecosystem models and directly supports applications in NASA CMS and California Air Resources Board (CARB) carbon monitoring efforts.

Read Akash’s report →

Aritra Dey: Interactive Quarto Notebooks for PEcAn Workflows​

Aritra created interactive Quarto notebooks that provide lightweight, reproducible introductions to PEcAn, replacing the previous introductory workflows that relied heavily on databases and the web User Interface. As more scientists become familiar with notebooks, these offer more flexible, direct, and extensible introductions to PEcAn workflows. These notebooks lower the barrier to entry for students and researchers, making it easier to run PEcAn models, explore uncertainty, and learn ecological forecasting through hands-on examples.

Read Aritra’s post →

Harsh Agrawal: Decoupling PEcAn Workflows from BETYdb​

Harsh addressed a long-standing architectural challenge by reducing PEcAn’s reliance on its central database. By decoupling key workflows from BETYdb, his work improves portability, simplifies development, and makes the system more accessible to new users and contributors.

Read Harsh’s post →

Beyond Software: Community and Mentorship​

GSoC projects reflect more than individual effort. They are the result of sustained mentorship, active code review, and an engaged open-source community. We thank the mentors and contributors who guided students, reviewed pull requests, and helped shape these projects into lasting improvements. And we thank Google for supporting open-source software and community development through GSoC.

The PEcAn Project is excited to announce the availability of funding for small projects and activities. This fund is made possible by GSOC mentor stipends.

We invite proposals for small grants to support activities that advance and promote PEcAn-related work.

Supported Activities​

The objective of this funding is to build and support the PEcAn community. A broad scope of activities could be supported. Examples include:

• Community Engagement: PEcAn-related swag or outreach activities that enhance community visibility and engagement.
• Workshops: Funding to help coordinate in-person PEcAn-related meetups.
• Conference Participation: Support for presenting PEcAn-related work at conferences.
• Publications: Assistance with publication costs for PEcAn-related papers.
• Other Uses: We are open to creative proposals that support the PEcAn community.

Expected Award Size​

All proposals will be considered contingent on available funds. We anticipate typical awards between $500-$3000 USD.

Eligibility​

• Open to all PEcAn community members.

Out of Scope / Excluded Activities​

• Activities that already have funding.
• PEcAn Software Development.
• Travel expenses for PEcAn workshops.

How to Apply​

Applicants are encouraged to discuss ideas with the community in the #pecan channel on Slack. Join PEcAn Slack here. Submit a brief proposal (1-2 pages) to pecanproj@gmail.com that includes:

1. Your Name & Affiliation
2. Description of Proposed Activity

• Scope of work
• Deliverables
• How it benefits the PEcAn community

3. Estimated Itemized Budget
4. Timeline (when funds will be used)

Submission​

Proposals will be reviewed on a rolling basis. Prior to formal submission, post ideas and ask questions on the #pecan Slack channel.

As Google Summer of Code 2024 comes to a close, the PEcAn project is proud to highlight the outstanding work of this year's participants. Participating in GSOC over the past eight years has been an opportunity not to expand our code base as well as our community.

Improving Github Actions for the PEcAn Project: Report on my 2023 GSOC project.

Introduction​

The project aims at creating and deploying a user friendly, interactive and accessible website for PEcAn Project. PEcAn Project's website consisted of html pages, bookdown and pkgdown pages being rendered separately. In this project, all separate sections have been integrated as a consistent, modern website with elegant UI with the help of Docusaurus 2, a static site generator. This project has been created as a part of GSoC'21.

Information​

The PEcAn 2 Terrestrial Model Informatics Workshop took place from May 9th-11th 2016 at Boston University.