The National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) is an NSF-funded, distributed observatory that represents the agency’s first major facilities investment in biology.  The vision of NEON arose from the ecological community as a means of answering some of the most exciting and challenging questions in continental-scale ecology. NEON will provide data, infrastructure and standardized methodologies to support ecological research and environmental education throughout the United States. Once fully operational, NEON’s infrastructure will include Mobile Deployment Platforms (MDPs) that can be made available for use to support PI-driven research.

Mobile Deployment Platforms will increase the capacity to capture spatial and/or temporal variation in ecological drivers and responses not captured by the measurements made at NEON’s terrestrial and aquatic sites. In particular, the MDPs will allow observation of stochastic events that cannot be captured using NEON’s fixed sampling resources, extend environmental gradients, and augment existing PI and agency research.  Battelle and the National Science Foundation welcome requests from individual researchers, research consortia, and other organizations (e.g., networks, federal agencies) to make use of the MDPs in support of their research projects. One of the MDPs will be on-site for this workshop; we will describe the instrumentation available with the MDP and how the MDPs will be deployed and operated. In addition, we will describe the process by which investigators can request the MDP and NEON’s other assignable assets.