Permitting constraints resulted in a partial change to the sampling area at the NEON Domain 04 Lajas Experimental Station site. A subset of plots were decommissioned and new plots were established in a nearby area.
The NEON Airborne Observation Platform (AOP) gives detailed remote sensing data at field sites both before and after a natural disaster, providing insights into impacts and recovery. The AOP is also available through NEON Research Support Services to gather remote sensing data for disaster sites outside of NEON field site locations and schedule.
At ESA2024, the NEON booth had lots of traffic, and many people were interested in learning about NEON data. NEON staff and leadership members also participated in several contributed talks, short courses, and workshops. Here are a few highlights.
Update to the naming convention for Terrestrial Observation System subplots is complete. Published data and spatial metadata reflect the new naming convention.
What drives the evolution of various mosquito traits, including those which make them vectors of disease? Dr. Brian Wiegmann used samples from the NEON Biorepository at ASU and other repositories to investigate the phylogeny of mosquitoes. He and his coauthors published their results in Nature Communications.
It was discovered recently that many older NEON metagenomic samples that were sequenced in 2018 – 2019 were not formatted correctly. The fastq files from these sequencing runs are not in error, but the reads in the paired end files are in a different order to each other. The variable formatting prevents automated bioinformatics workflows from interleaving paired reads. These files will be repaired and made available from the NEON website in the 2025 data release. This notification provides details for users to access or generate properly formatted files in the interim.
For our latest Women in Ecology interview, we spoke with Laura Steger, Environmental and Zoological Collections Manager for the NEON Biorepository at Arizona State University. Steger spent her childhood in nature, influencing her to continue in that environment and work with NEON, spending her time surrounded by different specimens and samples from many different ecosystems.
This year, surveys are being conducted at field sites representing 10 NEON Domains, including the Northeast (D01), Southeast (D03), Great Lakes (D05), Prairie Peninsula (D06), Ozarks Complex (D08), Central Plains (D10), Southern Plains (D11), Southern Rockies/Colorado Plateau (D13), Pacific Southwest (D17), and Taiga (D19).
Starting on January 1, 2024, several changes were made to the Periphyton, seston, and phytoplankton collection (DP1.20166.001) and Periphyton, seston, and phytoplankton chemical properties (DP1.20163.001) data products to improve data quality. Decisions to change these data products are congruent with the framework for NEON Observational Sampling Design Optimization (https://www.neonscience.org/optimizing-observational-sampling-designs). These changes affect data from all NEON aquatic sites.
The mosquito pathogen survey will close on June 7, 2024. All responses must be received by that date. There is a recorded webinar detailing the rationale for the changes if you would like to review it before completing the survey.
The crown polygons generated during canopy foliage sampling are in the WGS1984 projection. All other NEON remote sensing and spatial data are projected on the UTM grid. Going forward, NEON will project crown polygons in the UTM grid, and will update the existing crown polygons’ spatial projection.
In the U.S. Carolinas, where the Piedmont Plateau meets the Coastal Plain, rolling hills and deciduous forests give way to the longleaf pine forests of the Sandhills. This area provides ample opportunity to explore diverse regional habitats and investigate changing ecosystems. Thanks to an internship program supported by the Carolina Wildlands Foundation, students from local colleges and universities have the opportunity to gain fieldwork experience using protocols adapted from the NEON Program.
Arvind Varsani is interested in virus diversity at many scales and across species. He collaborated with Laura Steger and Kelsey Yule at the NEON Biorepository at ASU, along with other researchers, to explore the potential of extracting viral DNA from archived rodent fecal and liver samples. Their work was published recently in Virology.
We previously identified an issue with unusually high values for a subset of DOC concentrations published in Chemical properties of surface water. We have completed the investigation and determined that these values are sufficiently suspect to be removed from the data portal, starting with RELEASE-2025.
The strategy for mosquito pathogen testing is being reconsidered due to extremely low numbers of positive mosquito pathogen tests performed over the past decade. NEON staff have been reviewing the data collected to date and discussing options with the Mosquito Technical Working Group in recent months. NEON is inviting feedback through a survey from the broader community to guide the recommendation to the NSF on the preferred future direction for this data product.
There have been many changes in NEON's microbial data products, as were detailed in an earlier Data Notification. This is an update on the status of NEON microbe data.
A recent study using data from NEON aquatic sites shows that across the continent, under the right conditions, freshwater lakes and streams may act as both sources of atmospheric N2O, and as sinks for the gas. This behavior may help to partially offset N2O emissions and is crucial to account for in climate modeling.
For our latest interview, we spoke with Janey Lienau, a first-year Ph.D. student at the Yale School of the Environment. Lienau’s work in the soil lab focuses on the interaction between animals, plants, and soil in forest ecosystems. Her soil studies during the pandemic were made possible by NEON open data. She shares how her unique upbringing shaped her career aspirations, how she came to love fieldwork and asking questions, and her hopes and dreams for the future.
We reduced the number of dilution subsamples per root core in table bbc_dilution from 10 to 3 at all terrestrial sites. This change was reviewed and approved by the NEON Plant Biomass and Productivity Technical Working Group, and was implemented on 2023-08-02, saving 70% of the labor associated with time-intensive sorting of dilution subsamples.
Using isotopic data from NEON is one way that scientists can look into markers of ecosystem change and health. An R Package developed by Dr. Rich Fiorella calibrates atmospheric stable isotope data, enabling comparative analysis across NEON sites and the development of derived data products. The NEONiso R Package is available on the Comprehensive R Archive Network (CRAN) and GitHub and has been incorporated into the NEON data processing pipeline for the carbon isotope data product.
As of NEON’s 2024 Data Release, there have been modifications in the eddy covariance storage exchange (ECSE) workflow and bundled HDF5 files (DP4.00200.001).
NEON quantifies soil microbe biomass via measurement of phospholipid fatty acids (PLFA). The high-throughput PLFA method used involves addition of an internal standard to each sample, then PLFA concentrations are scaled by the recovery of that internal standard. For data collected prior to November 1, 2021, PLFAs were reported in unscaled format with extraction efficiency provided in order for users to conduct the scaling. After November 1, 2021, unscaled data are no longer ingested, and only data scaled to the internal standard are provided.
Permafrost degradation is an urgent concern for Arctic ecosystems and the global climate. A recent paper in Environmental Research Letters leverages artificial intelligence to develop better predictive models of permafrost degradation. The researchers utilized data from NEON’s terrestrial field sites in Alaska to train the model, along with data from the AmeriFlux network.
Over the last few years, our Women in Ecology series has spotlighted some of the women who work with the NEON program or are advancing ecology using NEON data. For Women’s History Month, we wanted to revisit some of the Women in Ecology we’ve featured in the blog series. If you missed these interviews the first time around, we invite you to get to know these amazing women and their work.
