Skip to main content
NSF NEON | Open Data to Understand our Ecosystems logo

Main navigation

  • About Us
    • Overview
      • Spatial and Temporal Design
      • History
    • Vision and Management
    • Advisory Groups
      • Science, Technology & Education Advisory Committee
      • Technical Working Groups (TWGs)
    • FAQ
    • Contact Us
      • Field Offices
    • User Accounts
    • Staff

    About Us

  • Data & Samples
    • Data Portal
      • Explore Data Products
      • Data Availability Charts
      • Spatial Data & Maps
      • Document Library
      • API & GraphQL
      • Prototype Data
      • External Lab Data Ingest (restricted)
    • Samples & Specimens
      • Discover and Use NEON Samples
        • Sample Types
        • Sample Repositories
        • Sample Explorer
        • Megapit and Distributed Initial Characterization Soil Archives
        • Excess Samples
      • Sample Processing
      • Sample Quality
      • Taxonomic Lists
    • Collection Methods
      • Protocols & Standardized Methods
      • Airborne Remote Sensing
        • Flight Box Design
        • Flight Schedules and Coverage
        • Daily Flight Reports
          • AOP Flight Report Sign Up
        • Camera
        • Imaging Spectrometer
        • Lidar
      • Automated Instruments
        • Site Level Sampling Design
        • Sensor Collection Frequency
        • Instrumented Collection Types
          • Meteorology
          • Phenocams
          • Soil Sensors
          • Ground Water
          • Surface Water
      • Observational Sampling
        • Site Level Sampling Design
        • Sampling Schedules
        • Observation Types
          • Aquatic Organisms
            • Aquatic Microbes
            • Fish
            • Macroinvertebrates & Zooplankton
            • Periphyton, Phytoplankton, and Aquatic Plants
          • Terrestrial Organisms
            • Birds
            • Ground Beetles
            • Mosquitoes
            • Small Mammals
            • Soil Microbes
            • Terrestrial Plants
            • Ticks
          • Hydrology & Geomorphology
            • Discharge
            • Geomorphology
          • Biogeochemistry
          • DNA Sequences
          • Pathogens
          • Sediments
          • Soils
            • Soil Descriptions
    • Data Notifications
    • Data Guidelines and Policies
      • Acknowledging and Citing NEON
      • Publishing Research Outputs
      • Usage Policies
    • Data Management
      • Data Availability
      • Data Formats and Conventions
      • Data Processing
      • Data Quality
      • Data Product Revisions and Releases
        • Release 2021
        • Release 2022
        • Release 2023
      • NEON and Google
      • Externally Hosted Data

    Data & Samples

  • Field Sites
    • About Field Sites and Domains
    • Explore Field Sites
    • Site Management Data Product

    Field Sites

  • Impact
    • Observatory Blog
    • Case Studies
    • Spotlights
    • Papers & Publications
    • Newsroom
      • NEON in the News
      • Newsletter Archive
      • Newsletter Sign Up

    Impact

  • Resources
    • Getting Started with NEON Data & Resources
    • Documents and Communication Resources
      • Papers & Publications
      • Document Library
      • Outreach Materials
    • Code Hub
      • Code Resources Guidelines
      • Code Resources Submission
      • NEON's GitHub Organization Homepage
    • Learning Hub
      • Science Videos
      • Tutorials
      • Workshops & Courses
      • Teaching Modules
      • Faculty Mentoring Networks
      • Data Education Fellows
    • Research Support and Assignable Assets
      • Field Site Coordination
      • Letters of Support
      • Mobile Deployment Platforms
      • Permits and Permissions
      • AOP Flight Campaigns
      • Excess Samples
      • Assignable Assets FAQs
    • Funding Opportunities

    Resources

  • Get Involved
    • Advisory Groups
      • Science, Technology & Education Advisory Committee
      • Technical Working Groups
    • Upcoming Events
    • Past Events
    • NEON Ambassador Program
    • Collaborative Works
      • EFI-NEON Ecological Forecasting Challenge
      • NCAR-NEON-Community Collaborations
      • NEON Science Summit
      • NEON Great Lakes User Group
    • Community Engagement
    • Science Seminars and Data Skills Webinars
    • Work Opportunities
      • Careers
      • Seasonal Fieldwork
      • Postdoctoral Fellows
      • Internships
        • Intern Alumni
    • Partners

    Get Involved

  • My Account
  • Search

Search

Impact

  • Observatory Blog
  • Case Studies
  • Spotlights
  • Papers & Publications
  • Newsroom

Breadcrumb

  1. Impact
  2. Observatory Blog
  3. Battelle Research Scientist Eric Sokol Studies Antarctica in Cross-Disciplinary Fashion

Spotlight

Battelle Research Scientist Eric Sokol Studies Antarctica in Cross-Disciplinary Fashion

March 14, 2023

Eric Sokol in Antarctica

Read the original post on Inside Battelle.

If you travel to the southern reaches of the Earth, you could find yourself in Antarctica on Ross Island. On this desolate island, at the foot of a smoking volcano known as Mount Erebus, is McMurdo Station, the largest research outpost on the Antarctic Continent.    

Across a wide sound lies a uniquely snow free area on the Antarctic mainland known as the McMurdo Dry Valleys. Here researchers are studying a polar desert which is one of the coldest, driest ecosystems on the planet. The relative simplicity of this ecosystem makes it a perfect natural lab for the science of early detection of climate change and may even provide an analog of the surface of other planets.

Much of this work is associated with the McMurdo Dry Valleys Long Term Ecological Research (MCM LTER) Project, an interdisciplinary study of the aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems. In 1992 this area in Antarctica was selected as a study site within the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Long-term Ecological Research (LTER) Program. It is here that Battelle Senior Ecologist Eric Sokol, who has worked at the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) since 2017, has focused much of his attention and studies. His work allows him to be both a research scientist and a data scientist, collaborating with colleagues from the MCM LTER from universities around the country on NSF grants to gather and produce ecological data and generate interpretations.

Eric Sokol in Antarctica

Eric Sokol with colleagues sampling mats near ponds on Cape Royds on Ross Island, Antarctica. Mt. Erebus is in the background.

Sokol began his career with an interest in understanding how stream insects could be used as bioindicators to discern stream health. While earning his PhD at Virginia Tech, he studied freshwater ecology, with a focus on aquatic insects in headwater streams in the southern Appalachians. Gathering data is a great first step, but its effective use for prediction requires modeling and statistics. Sokol’s career began to lean heavily in this more analytical direction leading him to work as a postdoc with the MCM LTER and co-author several successful proposals to study the biodiversity of microbes in Antarctica.

“My recent and current work focuses on using ecological theory to create models about where different sentinel taxa can be found in Antarctica and then testing the models with data collected by the MCM LTER and from satellites,” he said.  

With colleagues Jeb Barrett from Virginia Tech, Mike Gooseff at the University of Colorado Boulder, Mark Salvatore at Northern Arizona University and others, Sokol utilizes satellite imagery provided by the Polar Geospatial Center at the University of Minnesota and runs it through various ecological models.

Sokol has made five trips to the McMurdo Dry Valleys, all during austral (Southern Hemisphere) summer as it’s the only time of year when the biota he studies are active. “You want to collect samples and measure flow in the streams when that’s happening,” he said.

To access the microbial mats in the dry valleys, researchers take a helicopter over the frozen ocean to locations where glacial rivers flow into a chain of lakes. “The dry valleys are pretty simple compared to temperate ecosystems, so people test hypotheses and theories of ecology,” he said. “It’s really interesting stuff. The streams only flow for a small part of the year. There are no vascular plants.”

McMurdo Dry Valleys microbial mats

Microbial mats (in the foreground with rocks) in the Canada ASPA (Antarctic Specially Protected Area), next to Canada Glacier, in the headwaters of Canada Stream. This is the most productive and biodiverse area in the McMurdo Dry Valleys.

There’s a group of people who think this area can be viewed as an analog for what life might look like on other planets. “This ecosystem gives us clues of what to look for when searching for life on other planets,” Sokol said.

Because there are no vascular plants in these ecosystems, the microbial mats and mosses play a critical role as the major primary producers. “It’s challenging and expensive to explore the dry valleys on foot to find these microbial mats,” he said. “The satellite imagery is very useful for identifying new areas of biological activity that were previously unexplored. There’s a very distinct signature of plants that are photosynthesizing. You can see these areas lighting up the imagery. Importantly, these mats provide a sentinel ecosystem. They will respond to climate change if things are happening in the dry alleys, providing us with an early indicator.”

The ecological relevance of the work done on these NSF projects mirrors NEON in many respects, giving Sokol the chance to act as both a data user and data provider for projects focusing on macrosystems scale scientific questions.

At NEON, Eric is primarily a data scientist. He works closely with the NEON user community to find ways to solve standing problems by leveraging the open-source data provided by the 81 widely distributed terrestrial and aquatic NEON sites. He wears both a science hat and a data provider hat, wrangling data and working with the user community. “There’s a lot of overlap in tools for accessing the data on both sides,” he said. “Ecologists often struggle with what are the best ways to get data into models. It’s useful when I’m both the researcher and the data provider.”

Share

Related Posts:

AGU-TEX Project Update: Monitoring Blue Oaks in the Sierra Foothills
January 11, 2023
Touring NEON’S Airborne Observation Platform (AOP) in the Mid-Atlantic Domain
August 31, 2022
AGU-TEX Project Update: Supporting Wildland Restoration in Colorado
August 3, 2022
NEON Logo

Follow Us:

Join Our Newsletter

Get updates on events, opportunities, and how NEON is being used today.

Subscribe Now

Footer

  • My Account
  • About Us
  • Newsroom
  • Contact Us
  • Terms & Conditions
  • Careers

Copyright © Battelle, 2019-2020

The National Ecological Observatory Network is a major facility fully funded by the National Science Foundation.

Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.