Every year, the NEON program hires between 230-250 seasonal field technicians. These seasonal workers, often recent college graduates, are tasked with collecting field observations and physical samples at NEON field sites. A new internal Online Training Center makes it easier to standardize training across the NEON Domains and track training progress for new recruits.
We spoke with Dr. Bala Chaudhary, assistant professor of Environmental Science and Studies at DePaul University, about her career, about how the lack of representation of people of color – both while she was in school and in her professional career – drives her to work toward creating a more equitable academic system, and she shared insightful ways that universities and labs can improve.
Recently, SciTeens partnered with Florida State University to offer a virtual Data Science Camp for high school students in Florida. Participants learned how to manipulate and analyze data in the Python computer language and present data at a college level. The students in the Ecological Data Science Camp explored data from the NEON program and had an introduction into techniques for importing and analyzing the data.
Are you interested in investigating spatial and spectral relationships between high resolution airborne hyperspectral data and satellite observations? Learn more about our September 2020 data collection campaign at CPER in conjunction with Landsat7, Landsat8, and Sentinal 2A.
Happy Earth Day! Many NEON field sites are hosted by or colocated with organizations that do conservation and restoration work. The data NEON collects at these sites provide a window into how ecosystems are changing and the impact of restoration efforts.
Macroinvertebrate collection (DP1.20120.001) field data in the table inv_fieldData for all aquatic sites from 2014 through 2019 are duplicated on the NEON data portal due to an error on data transition for this table. Corrections have been made, but will not appear on the portal until the 2022 data release.
Domain 07, in the heartland of the U.S., is a land of rolling hills, steep ridges, gentle valleys, and many shades of green. The Appalachians and Cumberland Plateau feature some of the world's oldest mountains and the world's largest hardwood-forested plateau. The region's rich geologic history and temperate, moist climate have made it one of the most biodiverse areas of North America.
This month, Dr. Erin Hotchkiss talked with us about her current and upcoming projects, including a collaboration with NEON using sensors at NEON stream sites to investigate the relationships between terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems.
This is an update to the previous post concerning wind direction data from the buoys. NEON has field-verified current wind monitor orientations at the buoy sites, and is taking multiple corrective measures.
Observing and predicting mosquito phenology could answer important questions about relationships between climate, insect activity, and the spread of mosquito-borne diseases. These relationships can be explored with phenology data from NEON and the National Phenology Network (USA-NPN).
MDPs are mobile, modular NEON field stations that can go practically anywhere with road access. They put the power of NEON's instrumented systems into the hands of PIs, academic institutions, and research organizations.
The National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS) and NEON have developed an open resource onboarding document geared to support researchers beginning their postdoctoral work with NEON - it can be easily adapted for other early career scientists entering roles.
neonUtilities 2.0.1 is now available on CRAN! This new version resolves several bugs in the initial release of neonUtilities 2.0.0; update is highly recommended.
Happy World Wildlife Day! At the NEON program, we are lucky enough to share our workspaces with all kinds of wild creatures, great and small. And while we only collect data on a few (mosquitos, ticks, beetles, small mammals, birds, and fish, to be specific), we celebrate them all.
AIS field maintenance and calibration data are now available for the following data products for provisional data (primarily data collected July 1st, 2020 and after). Read on to see which data products provide these tables.
Our list of 'NEON Women to Watch' honors women we highlighted this past year whose educational and professional experiences provide a fascinating glimpse into women's paths in academic science, the crucial role of mentors and advocates in a student's development, and how the field can be more inclusive going forward.
In the middle of North America, the eastern forests give way to the tallgrass prairie. This is the Prairie Peninsula (D06), in the heartland of the U.S. Sometimes called "America's Breadbasket," this region provides ample opportunity to study the impact of agriculture and land management practices on tallgrass prairie ecosystems. It also provides a unique view of a transitional zone between the prairies and the eastern deciduous forest.
The pandemic has created new challenges for educators—but that doesn't mean learning has to stop. The Ecological Research as Education Network (EREN) collaborated with the NEON program in 2020 to create a series of Flexible Learning Projects that enable students to practice hands-on field ecology wherever they are—on campus or at home.
AGU's Thriving Earth Exchange Program has welcomed the newest cohort of Community Science Fellows, and first in partnership with NEON! This cohort is comprised of field staff across 12 of NEON’s Domains. Beginning in February 2021, they will be conducting outreach to communities within their Domains, and ultimately working with them to launch collaborative, co-developed community science projects that produce on-the-ground impact through application of NEON’s data and resources.
SciTeens is the brainchild of founders Carlos Mercado-Lara and John Sutor, who started the organization in 2018 when they were high school seniors. Their mission is to make free STEM resources – including data science resources – accessible to all students through online curricula, outreach, and mentoring. They leveraged ecological data from the NEON program to create their first data science projects.
The NEON microbial community composition data products have been re-processed and are available on the NEON data portal either as provisional data (data from December 2014 and earlier) or in the initial NEON data release (data from 2015 through October 2018) that is available now.
NEON and the Ecological Society of America established a NEON-ESA Early Career Scholars (NECS) program for 2020 to support a group of early career scholars attending ESA2020. The chosen scholars received registration to the Annual Meeting, which centered on the theme of "Harnessing the ecological data revolution," and benefited from virtual networking with NEON.
AOP has updated the file name, format and metadata for the Spectrometer Ortho-rectified at-sensor radiance data product (DP1.30008.001). The compression of the data has improved, and updates to end users' code may be needed.
This is an update to the previous post concerning wind direction data on the buoys. NEON has field-verified wind monitor orientation discrepancies at most buoy sites, which adversely affect wind direction data in Wind speed and direction on lakes on-buoy (DP1.20059.001). Buoy wind direction data will be corrected with measured offsets and/or quality flagged following further review over the next 6 months.
Dr. Jennifer Balch, a Fire Ecologist at University of Colorado Boulder, is studying wildfire-impacted areas in the western U.S. to answer burning questions about forest recovery and carbon storage potential. Her work could lead to improved models of the impact of wildfires on atmospheric carbon levels and climate change.
Issues identified with fDOM temperature and absorbance data have been resolved. The correct fDOM data are available on the portal and were included in NEON's first data release.
There are a few known code bugs in neonUtilities 2.0.0. A patch update resolving these bugs will be delivered in February, and workarounds for avoiding them are described here.
A new remote monitoring and near real-time alert system is helping NEON scientists rapidly detect and diagnose data anomalies that may indicate a problem with sensors or software.
