Concept

National Ecological Observatory Network

Summary
National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) is a large facility program operated by Battelle Memorial Institute and funded by the National Science Foundation. In full operation since 2019, NEON gathers and provides long-term, standardized data on ecological responses of the biosphere to changes in land use and climate, and on feedback with the geosphere, hydrosphere, and atmosphere. NEON is a continental-scale research platform for understanding how and why our ecosystems are changing. The vision for NEON is to guide global understanding and decisions in a changing environment with scientific information about continental-scale ecology through integrated observations, experiments and forecasts. NEON's mission is to design, implement and operate the first and foremost integrated continental‐scale scientific infrastructure to enable research, discovery and education about ecological change. NEON collects ecological and climatic observations across the continental United States, including Alaska, Hawaii and Puerto Rico. The observatory is among the first to detect and enable forecasting of ecological change at continental scales over multiple decades. NEON has partitioned the United States into 20 ecoclimatic domains, each of which represents different regions of vegetation, landforms, climate, and ecosystem performance. Data is collected by field technicians and passive sensors at strategically selected sites within each domain and synthesized into information products that can be used to describe changes in the nation's ecosystem through space and time. NEON data products are freely available via a web portal. The data NEON collects are defined by a series of Grand Challenges, as identified by the National Research Council at the request of the National Science Foundation. The National Research Council established a committee to evaluate the major ecological, environmental, and national concerns that require a continental-scale observatory, and it identified the following Environmental Grand Challenges: Biogeochemistry: The study of how chemical, physical, geological, and biological processes combine to create the natural environment.
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