Ecology finally has its Large Hadron Collider, and we are using it. The National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) became fully operational across 81 terrestrial and aquatic sites in May 2019, marking a key moment in the history of ecology. With the cost of construction and maintenance over the next 30 years projected to exceed $2.4 billion, this is an unparalleled investment in continental-scale ecology. The NEON Science Summit, held at CU Boulder in October 2019, was the very first community-driven ‘unconference’ focused on building new science from the NEON observatory. Over the course of two and a half days, ~15 break-out working groups used NEON data to explore questions such as: What are the environmental drivers of microbial community composition across sites? How do we link ground, UAV, airborne, and satellite data across NEON sites to better see trees and identify them to species? Does the relationship between native and exotic species richness change with spatial scale?
Results/Conclusions
Early NEON adopters are already exploring questions of foundational ecology and response to environmental change across space and time scales, with over 80 publications using NEON assets and over 22,000 NEON data downloads. However, the Summit identified two emergent Grand Challenges for NEON to reach its full potential: building open data skills for all ecologists and linking NEON to the larger environmental data constellation. The first Grand Challenge, and arguably the foundation for advancing NEON-generated knowledge, is building the core skills necessary for open, data-intensive ecology. The second Grand Challenge is to link NEON to major environmental datasets including: existing observatory networks (eg LTER and CZO); emergent observing sensors and platforms (eg UAVs and microsensors); key satellite and space-borne assets (eg Landsat, ECOSTRESS, and GEDI); and climate and land-use data and models (eg GRIDMET and CMIP6). We need our research community to promote a new ecology, embracing new data skills, data-driven inquiry and analytical approaches, coordinated and large-team science, and a commitment to open science. Our vision is that, through environmental data skills and links to diverse environmental data, the NEON community will address the continental-scale ecology questions that the network observatory was designed to answer.