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.
neonUtilities 2.0.0 is now available on CRAN! This new version contains critical updates for working with the NEON Data Release and associated API and Portal changes. An update to 2.0.0 is required for working with any newly downloaded data.
Based on an analysis of nutrient data, NEON has determined that the method detection limits (MDLs) required of the external laboratory for surface water and groundwater nutrient analyses are too high for many sites. New analyses of frozen samples will take place in the future.
Surface water microbe cell count (DP1.20138.001) laboratory data for all aquatic sites from 9/2017 to 9/2020 were found to have incorrect calculations populating rawMicrobialAbundance data field. Data have been removed from the data portal while revisions are made and will be republished by February.
Dr. Harmon-Threatt, associate professor of entomology at the University of Illinois School of Integrative Biology, discusses how her mentors first opened her eyes to the possibility of pursuing a career in ecology and how she hopes to provide the same opportunities to her female students, especially those of color, to increase the representation of women of color in academia and the natural sciences.
Due to a miscommunication, samples analyzed for carbon (C) and nitrogen (N) concentrations and stable isotopes were not previously re-dried prior to weighing and analysis at the external laboratory. Affected data have been flagged and a new protocol was implemented.
To reduce uncertaintly in surface and groundwater elevation data, permanent benchmarks have been installed at most aquatic sites to serve as controlled location reference points. Updated elevations from the associated site resurveys are available on the data portal. Surface and groundwater elevation data products have been reprocessed, and, the corrected data will be available via the data portal by January 18, 2020.
The Great Lakes Domain (D05) is named for its most recognizable feature: the Great Lakes themselves. At our field sites in Wisconsin and Michigan, we're collecting data representing different management practices in the northern pine and hardwood forests. The data will help researchers understand how land management practices impact both terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems in the Great Lakes region.
An investigation into freshwater diatoms from the NEON aquatic field sites in Puerto Rico led to a reclassification of diatom taxa in the region, and the possible discovery of a new diatom species. A paper recently published in Phytotaxa details the results of the research, which was enabled by samples from the NEON Biorepository.
We have discovered an error in the larval tick count data collected in 2016-2017 in Ticks sampled using drag cloths (DP1.10093.001) that affects all sites. Samples from the tick taxonomy laboratory had a count of 1 larva in the taxonomy table no matter how many individuals were present in the sample. The data will be rectified within 2-3 weeks.
NEON's 2020 contributions demonstrate the significant impact this data has on ecological science. Here are 10 of the most exciting news items from the NEON program in the past year.
The sunlit plant foliage major, minor, and trace element data (DP1.10026.001, cfc_elements table) collected in 2017 and 2018 were investigated and deemed untrustworthy. Sample major, minor, and trace elements were re-measured using foliar material from the NEON Biorepository. Following review, these new data were posted to the Data Portal on 2020-10-29.
