The National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) will be a national resource for ecological research and education. NEON’s educational mission is to enable society and the scientific community to use ecological information and forecasts to understand and effectively address critical ecological questions and issues. The NEON web portal will feature tools to help educators engage students in scientific inquiry using NEON data.
Results/Conclusions
The NEON web portal will facilitate student, educator, and researcher engagement with continental-scale ecological data by providing a suite of integrated web tools for data visualization and analysis as well as community-driven discussion areas about ecological topics and data. Each user will be able to enter the NEON web community through their own personalized NEON “homepage”, and choose the content and tools they want displayed. Users will have open access to NEON continental-scale ecological data and NEON Data Products, which will help researchers, educators and students accelerate their own research and inquiry. The NEON portal will also provide analysis tools in the form of software “widgets” that allow users to easily visualize, graph, interpret, and discuss ecological data patterns with their peers and colleagues. For example, one widget may enable users to create a bar graph with two types of NEON data from a select list of data products and another widget may display the spatial distribution of a particular species sampled by NEON. Other widgets will provide informational content or community forums. These widgets can be added or removed from your personal NEON homepage. The NEON web portal community can use the NEON portal discussions and forums to engage with other researchers, educators and students to discuss all NEON Data Products and data, user created widget content from NEON data, or other ecological issues.