- [Narrator] Hi everyone.
My name is Donal O'Leary.
I'm a research scientist
on the science education team here at NEON.
And today, I wanted to give you a brief overview
of NEON spatial design and geospatial data.
So let's get started.
First of all, NEON has separated
the contaminants 48 States,
Alaska, Hawaii, and Puerto Rico into
20 different eco climatic domains.
Now, this was done using a multi-variate clustering analysis
of such factors as incoming precipitation,
average annual air temperature,
and other ecologically important factors.
And after we distinguished this area
into 20 different domains,
we found the locations for each one of our field sites
that best represents the variety of climate and ecology
that can take place in those domains.
So for places such as the Northeast,
those field sites are really very representative
of the entire region.
However, for places like the Desert Southwest,
and the Colorado Rockies and Plateau,
those reasons are so incredibly diverse
that each one of those fields sites is not entirely able
to represent the entire domain.
So that concept of representativeness
does vary throughout our observatory.
And it's something to take note of
when you're applying our information for your own research.
So we have several sources of NEON spatial data,
including our spatial data and maps,
field site information.
I've shown how to navigate to those,
through our navigation options on our webpage
in the blue texts there.
You will download coordinates with data
as you get it either from our data portal
or through our API.
And if you want higher precision UTM
easting and northing coordinates,
those are available through our geoNEON package.
There's a good tutorial on how to use that,
if you search geoNEON on our website.
But I won't get into that too much for right now.
So let's talk about our aquatic field sites.
First of all, we have three different types of field sites,
and two different types of moving water field sites.
We have our streams and our rivers.
These are set up in a fairly similar way except that
for our streams, the ones where we can have
a field scientist walk across them,
we have an upstream and downstream sensor in these sites.
And we also have riparian assessment strips.
These dark green transects across the stream,
where our scientists go through and collect observations
on the different types of flora and fauna
that exist in those zones.
We also have groundwater wells,
and this blue squares and meteorological stations
that we have across this reach of stream.
If the stream gets too big and it's not safe
for someone to walk across,
then we call it a river.
And we will have a buoy out in the middle of river
instead of our upstream and downstream sensors.
But otherwise the field site layout for streams and rivers
is fairly similar.
However, for our lakes things get a bit different.
We have a buoy again in the middle of the lake,
and generally the lake's deepest location,
but we have two other sensor sites with these
yellow circles with an L in them.
The L here stands for the lateral zone,
and these sensors are in places
close to the edge of the lake,
where sunlight can actually reach the bottom of the lake
and eliminate the subsurface there.
So these lakes also of course have groundwater wells,
and meteorological stations,
as well as our riparian assessment zone surrounding them.
Our terrestrial field sites switch things up a bit,
where we have our tower indicated in the blue square here,
and the tower's prevailing air shed defines
the region where we monitor our tower-based plots,
and some of our soil-based plots and our soil array.
We have a very intensive monitoring
location nearby the tower,
but then we also have these distributed sites
across the field site.
So these little white squares
are our distributed-based plots,
and those occur across all of the different land cover types
as is indicated by the background covers on this map here.
Let's talk a little bit more about
our terrestrial observed data.
So one aspect of this is our small mammal trap.
So we put out a grid of small mammal traps
in these different sites.
And you can use the geoNEON package again
to get highly precise easting and northing coordinates
for each one of these traps.
We also do a vegetation survey,
where we measure all of the trees greater than
10 centimeters DBH in 40 by 40 meter plots
across all of the tower and distributed based plots.
Our Terrestrial Instrument Data is also very interesting.
Most charismatically, we have our instruments
located on our NEON flux towers.
These towers are designed to be a bit taller
than the vegetation that they're monitoring,
so they're different heights depending on each ecosystem.
And each one of these towers is multiple levels
above the ground where we collect information,
and that's located in the zOffset attribute
of each one of these datasets.
Our soil plots measure in the opposite direction,
where they're going down into there.
And this number five here is a soil moisture sensor.
Here's a zoom in on our soil moisture sensors.
You can see, we have different monitoring locations
at different depths in the soil surface.
And this is also represented by that zOffset
in a depth in meters for these measurements.
So that is our brief overview for now.
Of course, we have much more information available
on our website,
and if you ever have any questions,
feel free to reach out to us.
Thanks for your time.