As instructors prepare to teach students foundational principals of ecology, they must also prepare the workforce of tomorrow to harness the ecological data revolution. The data and resources from the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) provide instructors with a foundation for building data-centric teaching materials around core concepts and allow for students to conduct independent inquiries to learn through application of ecological practices.
NEON provides open, standardized ecological data from 81 locations across the United States that cover a wide range of subject areas within ecology, including organismal observations, biogeochemistry, remote sensing, and micrometeorology. One of the barriers frequently cited by instructors wanting to implement data-driven teaching material is the lack of support in implementing a new style of teaching in the university or college classroom. In order to be able to do research and education with these data, NEON provides various training and educational tools built through collaboration between scientists and educators.
Results/Conclusions:
NEON provides several resources to support faculty wanting to implement the latest techniques in their classroom to embrace the ecology data revolution. Online data training tutorials can be used by faculty to gain skills or integrated into the curricula to teach students needed data processing skills while learning ecological concepts. The NEON Faculty Mentoring Network, through collaboration with QUBES, is a mechanism for providing support for faculty interested in creating and/or implementing data-driven curriculum. Collaboratively developed open educational resources are available for instructors to implement in their own classrooms. Woven through all of these resources is the to integrate data skills best practices with core ecological concepts, all while exposing students to large, open data sets. NEON provides faculty with open access tools, resources and support to help them bring quantitative methods into their ecology and biology courses using NEON data.