In an effort to provide standardized and more efficient ways to install soil sensors, NEON recently purchased the first of several soil coring machines to install soil sensors up to three meters deep at all 60 terrestrial sites around the US.
Kansas State University scientists and collaborators have developed a new method for studying a variety of streams — including tropical, prairie or forested streams — across continents. Walter Dodds has led the researchers in creating the Stream Biome Gradient Concept, which is a way to compare streams in different climates and different continents. The concept can improve how researchers study streams worldwide.
SACNAS (Society for the Advancement of Hispanic/Chicano and Native Americans in Science) is all about inspiration, and that is why it was such a pleasure to attend the national conference last month in Los Angeles.
It has been over two years since I was last in the woods of New Hampshire collecting invasive plant data for my undergraduate research. From then to now, I have thought little about data sets or statistical variability.
NEON Member Institution representatives learned about NEON data collection first-hand this week during a visit the Central Plains Experimental Range (CPER), the Domain 10 core site. This site tour was part of the 2014 NEON Membership Meeting, held October 21-22 in Boulder, CO at NEON Headquarters.
After spending time together in NEON’s summer internship program, Ariel Kaluzhny (a computer science student) and Maddy Ball (an environmental science major) learned a lot about their NEON projects, explored a good bit of Colorado and became great friends.
NEON is quite the unexpected place for an Imaging Science student to do an internship. NEON is all about Ecology, so where am I supposed to fit in here?
I come from Bogotá, Colombia where I study Environmental Engineering and Industrial Engineering at the Universidad de los Andes. You might ask, “What’s a student from Colombia doing here?”
During the 2013 spring semester, I registered for the Surveying for Engineers class at my college. The class was not required for my Environmental Science major, which caused my advisor to question why I would want to take it.
NEON is excited to present its first video in a series of multimedia resources. The Story of LiDAR Data provides a general overview of LiDAR data and highlights how LiDAR data is used to measure structural characteristics of trees.
NEON staff celebrate a major accomplishment as four PODs full of sensor equipment ship off to Blandy (D2), Disney (D3), Jones (D3) and Jornada (D14) this week, which marks the beginning of phase three sensor installation for those sites.
NEON is pleased to welcome its second cohort of summer interns! This year, seven interns join NEON mentor teams to analyze preliminary AOP, aquatic, and terrestrial data, code algorithms to automate image and data processing, and explore citizen science data for early trends. It promises to be an exciting summer.
When you pull up nutrient data for soil cores from across the United States, remember this: They were collected by our hardy and conscientious field technicians.
Congressman Jared Polis toured NEON headquarters, heard short presentations and participated in a town hall discussion with NEON staff on Earth Day, April 22, 2014.
On March 19, 2014, the White House launched the Climate Data Initiative (CDI), part of President Obama's Climate Action Plan launched in June 2013. The Climate Action Plan is the Administration's blueprint for domestic and international efforts to prepare for the impacts of climate change and reduce carbon emissions. The CDI is meant to spur the innovative use of open machine-readable government data to help communities deal with the impacts of climate change.
Understanding and predicting the effects of global change on ecosystems is a compelling frontier in ecological research, write the authors of a synthesis paper in the March 2014 issue of Ecosphere .
Just as most of an iceberg stays hidden under the surface of the ocean, many of the most important ecosystem processes happen underfoot. Soil properties, processes and organisms play key roles in everything from climate change to crop growth to clean water and natural disasters.
One of NEON's goals is to monitor carbon cycling at all its terrestrial sites. Gaining an enhanced understanding of the movement of carbon between the atmosphere, vegetation, and soils may help us better understand and predict ecosystem responses to changing conditions like increased carbon emissions from fossil fuel burning.
NEON scientist Dr. Stefan Metzger received the 2013 Young Scientist Award from the German Meteorological Society at the DACH conference of German, Austrian and Swiss meteorologists in Innsbruck, Austria, on September 3. The award is presented every three years for outstanding developments and achievements across all fields of meteorology.
The second annual COOPEUS (COOPeration EU and U.S.) strategic planning meeting was held at NEON last week in order to continue the development of joint harmonization and interoperability between partner observatories in the U.S. and Europe.
Internship programs are all about learning – learning your discipline; learning about work environments and careers; about time management and teamwork; about yourself.
One key requirement for NEON site construction is that construction activities have zero impact on the surrounding ecosystem – because any disturbance interferes with NEON’s ability to capture a true baseline for U.S. ecology.
In the latest issue of American Scientist, NEON Citizen Science Director Sandra Henderson and Chicago Botanic Garden Senior Scientist Kayri Havens describe the evolution of the six-year-old NEON citizen science program Project Budburst and tie it back to its historic roots in the observations recorded by naturalists and amateur scientists of centuries past.
