OOS 4

The National Ecological Observatory (NEON): Opportunities and models for building synergistic partnerships with the community to advance continental scale ecology.

In an era of advancing continental scale ecology, this session highlights models and opportunities for the community to use NEON data, and the information, physical and support infrastructure to initiate and expand research at NEON sites and beyond. The National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) is a NSF-funded Observatory with a mission to enable understanding and forecasting of the impacts of climate change, land-use change and invasive species on continental-scale ecology. NEON provides infrastructure and standardized methodologies to generate high quality and freely available data. The data and infrastructure leveraged by the scientific community, educators, decision makers and the public at large will enable investigations about the causes and consequences of ecological change at the continental scale. Further, the scientific community will have the opportunity to propose augmenting NEON measurements and experiments. NEON will provide consistent, long-term in situ and remote measurements at 60 terrestrial sites and 36 aquatic sites in 20 domains across the continent, Alaska, Hawaii and Puerto Rico. Beyond its 60 flux towers and 36 instrumented aquatic sites, NEON infrastructure will include three Aerial Observation Platforms (AOP) and ground based mobile deployment platforms that can be made available as targets of opportunity for use to support PI-driven research and to study the aftermath of major ecological events, such as hurricanes, floods and fires. Presentations in this session will discuss past, current and future models and outcomes of synergistic ecological activities between NEON and the community and will foster discussions regarding how the community can utilize NEON data and infrastructure to contribute further to addressing pressing scientific challenges in continental scale ecology.