The National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) provides a unique, extensible infrastructure that is monitoring all of the major ecosystems of the United States. 81 field sites strategically placed across the United States provide a broad set of data products from freshwater and terrestrial ecosystems. NEON data are collected at these sites by in situ and airborne instruments, as well as by dedicated field crews. These free, open data are published on a regular schedule, including 24/7 monitoring of common drivers (e.g., meteorology) as well as daily to annual measurements of response data (e.g., organismal composition and diversity, disease prevalence, water quality). The centralization and standardization of this scale, diversity, and complexity of data by a single organization supports high-resolution modeling of small to large regions and is already fueling new research into local-to-continental scale ecosystem processes and supporting ecological forecasting.
Results/Conclusions
In order to illustrate the power of NEON data, some exciting new research will be highlighted in this talk, along with a brief introduction to their open workflows. We will discuss NEON’s dedication to providing data that conform to FAIR principles, and the ways the NEON Data Portal supports those principles. NEON’s code resources, as well as code packages contributed by the research community, are an important but little known aspect of NEON that are the seeds of a future code library for data analysis and visualization. Finally, we will showcase NEON's many learning resources, ranging from short videos, teaching modules, and extensive tutorial series, as well as resources provided by the community. We emphasize the importance of openness in all NEON-related work and community-building.