This report assesses the research and science opportunities enabled by NEON data and resources at the Initial Observatory Capability (IOC) construction milestone in June 2015.  Key findings include: only relatively simple science questions can be addressed at IOC, as is expected given the restricted spatial deployment of sites in initial operations.  This also implies a limited number of data products that span a short period of time.

Read these guidelines if you are interested in learning more about how to coordinate research activities near NEON sampling locations. If you are interested in conducting research activities on NEON field sampling locations, please review the process for requesting assignable assets.

Shapefile polygon flight boundaries (areas) for the field sites NEON will survey with the Airborne Observation Platform. These files include flight boundaries for aquatic and terrestrial field sites at all sites in NEON Domains D01 to D19. Flight boundaries are assigned either a high (Priority 1), medium (Priority 2) or low (Priority 3) acquisition priority providing airborne sensor operators with greater flexibility in the event poor weather conditions prevent 100% data collection coverage during the scheduled deployment to a given site.

This experimental code is written in the Python programming language and needs a fair amount of fine tuning. It's a prototype script that can be used with NEON phenocam data to automate snow depth estimation. The procedures are still preliminary, but the code has performed fairly well. Feel free to download it, play with it, and, of course, improve it!