Workshop Report: NEON Planning Workshop I

This workshop was organized to provide advice to the National Science Foundation regarding the formation, organization and potential roles of a National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON). A second workshop dealing with technological infrastructure will follow in March, 2000, followed by a third workshop on network management issues later in the year. All workshops will be posted on the internet to allow for full participation and commentary by the research community. The purpose of NEON is to provide a broad integrated network of ecological research and monitoring sites that would constitute a distributed facility for researchers in environmental biology spanning all levels of biological organization from molecular genetics to whole-ecosystems at landscape and continental scales. Other disciplines such as physics and astronomy have advanced greatly with the provision of major infrastructural investments. With the increasing challenge for biologists to observe planet earth, a major investment in infrastructure is needed. Some of the background of NEON grew out of previous discussions of a proposed Biodiversity Observation Network (BON), but would represent a broader, more interdisciplinary enterprise involving ecological, evolutionary and systematic issues extending far beyond biodiversity. The workshop participants represented fields of systematics, population genetics, evolutionary ecology, population biology, microbial ecology, animal behavior, physiological ecology, ecological informatics, and community, ecosystem and landscape ecology. These researchers work in both terrestrial and aquatic environments and with organisms ranging from microbes to higher plants and vertebrates.