What can a ground beetle tell us about the environment? Quite a lot! This diverse and ubiquitous family of insects provides a window into environmental health and change. Erik Oberg, a biologist at Yellowstone National Park, is leading an ambitious beetle-biodiversity initiative on the Northern Range of the park.
How are ecosystems across the continent changing over time? What are the relationships between climate, ecosystem composition and soil organic matter? And how are soil composition and carbon storage potential likely to change in the future? The answers lie under our feet.
Interested in ensuring that the National Ecological Observatory Network is a valuable resource for your research? Consider joining a NEON advisory group and help shape NEON science and data.
NEON staff have been collecting data on stochastic disturbances and site management activities observed at all aquatic and terrestrial NEON sites and have just released this information as a new data product, Site Management and Event Reporting.
It's one thing to read about ecological concepts in a textbook. It's another to see them revealed by real-world data. Students at Ball State University recently explored key ecological concepts using data from the NEON program.
A new study led by François Ritter, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Illinois–Chicago Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, provides important insights into the frequency of dew formation across the U.S.
A new study funded through the National Science Foundation (NSF) Rapid Response to Funding (RAPID) Grant program attempts to answer critical questions about the correlations between biomass burned from wildfires and the emitted quantities of trace gases and aerosols.
Hello again. Over the last few months I have been back at NEON working/consulting with Battelle and the staff here in Boulder, Colorado as the observatory moves into full operations. So I am once again back on the “Inside Looking Out.”
Tucked away in Hawai‘i's Pu‘u Maka‘ala Natural Area Reserve (NAR), NEON's final field site will transition from construction to operations this spring. It joins monitoring and conservation efforts already underway in this unique pacific tropical ecosystem. NEON data will support these efforts and give researchers new insight into how the climate and ecosystem are changing in the mountains of Hawai‘i.
Attendees of a recent NSF-sponsored joint NCAR and NEON workshop, Predicting life in the Earth system – linking the geosciences and ecology identify some tangible synergies and paths forward to advance the capability of Earth system prediction to include terrestrial ecosystems and biological resources.
The first year of full operations in Puerto Rico was a rough one. Just as the field sites were coming online for the first time, Hurricane Maria dealt the island a devastating blow. Now, the NEON project is helping researchers monitor the aftereffects as well as other changes in this vibrant and fascinating ecoclimate domain.
How do you measure the biodiversity of an ecosystem? A paper published in Nature Ecology & Evolution examines the use of species traits as Essential Biodiversity Variables (EBVs)—and how data products from NEON and other large-scale observatory networks can be used to monitor changes in biodiversity over time.
Remote locations. Brutally cold winters. Short summers with 24-hour sunlight. Our Tundra field sites have some of the most challenging field conditions among our NEON locations—and some of the most spectacular scenery and wildlife.
An estimated 600 megatons of carbon are currently held by reactive minerals deep within terrestrial soils around the world —more than twice the amount of carbon that humans have added to the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution began. Understanding the pathways and variables that influence carbon sequestration in soil could lead to new ideas to combat climate change and protect vulnerable ecosystems.
Dr. Paul Siri Wilson is shining a light on some understudied members of California's ecosystems: bryophytes. He and his students are creating a new ebook and sponsoring open microscope days to bring awareness to the mosses, liverworts and other non-vascular plants that most people take for granted in the landscape.
Thinking about planning a ground sampling project in coordination with one of our airborne remote sensing surveys? The 2019 NEON flight campaign plans have been announced. The season will run from March to October, covering fifteen NEON domains and including 35 terrestrial sites and 21 aquatic sites.
Need a bulk order of ground beetles? How about some frozen soil samples? Or a selection of well-preserved small mammal specimens? Now, you can check out these and dozens of other biological sample types from the NEON Biorepository.
To build better models of watershed processes and calibrate remote sensing data with observations on the ground, a diverse team of researchers spent two weeks this summer gathering soil and vegetation data from hundreds of individual sites within the East River watershed near Crested Butte, CO.
Two major reports recently came out (the 4 th National Climate Assessment and the Second State of the Carbon Cycle Report) that got me thinking about our changing planet and the role of NEON in monitoring those changes.
Ecological data collected in the field gives researchers a window into how ecosystems and climate are changing in a particular area. But to see the bigger picture, you have to take a step back— way back. All the way to space.
Several long-term national and international science networks such as the Long-Term Ecological Research Network (LTER), the Critical Zone Observatory (CZO), AmeriFlux and GLEON are driving a deeper understanding of environmental processes and systems. But how can these networks complement and reinforce each other? And how does the NEON project fit in among these established networks?
If you've been out walking in the woods or tall grasses this summer, you may have brought home an unwelcome passenger on your clothes or person. Ticks—and the diseases they carry—are on the move throughout much of the United States.
On October 19, U.S. Senator Jeanne Shaheen (NH-D), Ranking Member of the Senator Appropriations Commerce, Science, and Justice Subcommittee, visited NEON’s Bartlett Experimental Forest field site to learn firsthand about the long-term, continental-scale and open access data collection program.
In early October, hundreds of scientists from the National Science Foundation’s LTER Network gathered together in Asilomar, CA for their All Scientists Meeting, which takes place once every three years. This year several scientists from NEON were invited.
What does the future of ecological research look like? And where does the NEON project fit in? I had the opportunity to reflect on these questions in depth at the recent annual meeting of the Ecological Society of America.
It's never too early to get kids interested in ecology—and Girl Scouts may provide the perfect opportunity. A troop of 6th graders is tackling important issues in habitat preservation and ecosystem change through a Girl Scout Journey focused on animals, ecology and NEON.
A new study out of the University of Wisconsin—nicknamed "CHEESEHEAD19," for Chequamegon Heterogeneous Ecosystem Energy-balance Study Enabled by a High-density Extensive Array of Detectors 2019—seeks to explore and resolve some of the inconsistencies between local observations and the data that drive our environmental models.
018 is an exciting year for the NEON project. The construction of the observatory is nearing completion, with almost all field sites transitioned into operations. The NEON Data Portal now houses a growing collection of data products from our aquatic and terrestrial field sites.
A study led by Lawrence Berkley National Laboratory (LBNL) has used the NEON assignable assets program to gather airborne remote sensing data near Crested Butte, Colorado. They will use the data to study plant community distributions and canopy biochemistry to shed light on watershed systems.
Could drones be part of the NEON program's arsenal of data collection platforms one day? Their low cost and versatility could help NEON expand its airborne remote sensing capacities. Before integrating them into NEON's operations, however, more work has to be done.
