- [Instructor] In this video, I'm going to walk you
through how to use Neon's Data Portal.
So feel free to open up a browser tab
and follow along as we explore this great resource.
So what we have here is data.neonscience.org
this is our data portal welcome page
and today we're gonna focus
on the explore data products page so you can click
on this explore button right here
and this will open up our explore data products page.
This is your graphical user interface
to access all of Neon's available data products.
So here in the middle we have a bunch of little tiles
that have our individual data products
over on the left side we have a number of filters
now most of these are pretty self-explanatory
but the one I really wanna point out
is the science team filter so here at Neon
we break our data up into five different groups
based on their science team one being
our airborne observation platform
that is our remote sensing data
hyperspectral lidar high resolution RGB camera imagery
and then we have things broken down into our aquatic
and terrestrial teams and within each one of those teams
those data are further subdivided
into our instrument systems and our observation systems.
So our instrument systems are instruments
you're probably familiar with much like
things like that anything that comes in
and kind of a data stream of ones and zeros
and then our observation system
is our team of expert scientists that are out there
I like to think of them as our boots on the ground
those are the folks making direct observations
such as flora and fauna presence and abundance
and things like that.
So within these five different science teams
you'll find our data sets broken out into each one
of these categories.
Now I think the most useful aspect of this webpage
is the search bar.
So one data product I use quite often
for an example is photosynthetically active radiation
or what we affectionately refer to as PAR.
So this data set here you can see once you put
in the search terms it'll bring up a new subset
of filtered data products
they're actually 81 different filter data products
for this particular search term but what we want pops right
up at the top.
So let's take a look at this tile here
that we have in front of us and this will give you all sorts
of great information about this data product in particular.
The first one I'm gonna click on is this header
up at the top so if you click this,
this is an active link to the data product description page
in here you can find the data product ID,
this is a unique identifier for every one
of our data products and you'll get really familiar
with these if you use Neon data for any length of time.
We have a description and the abstract for this dataset
our citation so much like any the other scientists
in the community you're welcome to reference our work
and to use our publicly accessible data please just cite us
if you do so it helps us track our usage
and our funding agency The National Science Foundation
really loves to see all of these amazing papers
that are being published using Neon data.
If you keep scrolling down you'll have some details
about the collection and processing but the documentation
here these PDFs that pop-up are probably your best resource
for finding out really detailed information
about these data products.
If you keep scrolling down you'll find our issue logs
so we have one of these for every data product
and you can take a look to see if there are unresolved
or resolved issues and you can even filter
by a particular site so if you're only using one site
you might wanna look to see are there any known issues
with this particular data product for this site?
If you click on one of these issues
that would give you a nice description of what's going on
and it'll tell you if we've resolved it or not
and what we've done to resolve that issue.
I'm gonna skip past this availability section
for just a moment to get to the visualization
so many of our data products
especially the instrument data products
have a visualization available this is a great way
to take a look at the data before you actually download any
just to get a sense of if this is the data product
that you're really looking for
you can visualize by different sites
and even our different sensor positions
if we have multiple sensors at our individual sites
you can pull up different variables
such as the quality control metrics, et cetera.
So I'm gonna close this page
and go back to the explore data products page,
from here I'll click on the download data button
which will open up a new interface for us to explore
and download these data so once you open it up
it'll come in this summary view but my preferred view
is to click on the view by site button
and here you can see the blue rectangles indicate a month
for which the data product is available at this given site
so for Abby or a Recory you can see the months
that they're available the gray boxes are either before
or after the data were available
or for some data products they're not collected every month.
So they might not be available for every single month
but this gives you a good indication of when
and where this data product is available
across the Neon observatory.
So you can click on these rows if you wanna select a site
or more once you have a site selected you can filter down
by the date range that you want to select.
So it defaults to the entire date range
but let's say we just wanna couple of months worth of data
so I'll go from September to November of 2019
so you can see how I am filtering using these options here
as you start to narrow in on your desired data set
the download Explorer will give you an estimated size
for your download this is the unzipped size
so your download itself will actually be quite a bit smaller
than this 'cause it comes compressed but once you unzip it
it'll be about this much data.
So once you are happy with your selection
you can click on the next button
and we'll ask you a few more questions
such as do you want to include documentation?
Sure why not?
I always include those PDFs 'cause they're helpful
at one point or another.
And which package do you want?
The basic package includes all of the data
that you'll need to, you know,
take a look at the data and see what the values are
but the expanded data package includes a much greater depth
of information about our quality control metrics
and what we've done to ensure that we're delivering you
the highest quality data possible for your research
so I almost always select the expanded package
but this can be a much larger file
especially for the instrument systems
if you're going over months and months of data.
Finally we'll ask you to agree to the citation policies.
So you'll agree to that and we'll even give you
a suggested citation here on this final page
so in this confirmation page you can review exactly
what you're gonna download here
and when you're ready you can click
the download data button.
Well that is everything you need to know
about how to download data from Neon.
Of course if you have any questions we're more than happy
to help you with that.
At the bottom of every one of our pages
is a contact us form so if you scroll all the way down
and go down to the bottom header here click on contact us
this will open up our forum where you can submit any inquiry
that's relevant to your research
we will direct your questions
to the most appropriate subject matter expert to ensure
that we can get you the most accurate
and complete information possible so that you can continue
your research with confidence.
So feel free to reach out to us.
Thank you for your time and best of luck with your research.