One of the challenges of being a scientist is to think big.
Our ecosystems are changing. We need to be able to know how best to manage them, how best to respond.
It's an all-hands-on-deck moment in our field.
NEON is envisioned around a number of grand challenges of ecology.
These are things like climate change changes in biogeochemistry, biodiversity
invasive species, and NEON is going to provide one of the most important
datasets we can bring to bare to really push the science forward.
I got into science because I've always loved maps and I've always been an avid hiker and bicyclist.
I grew up in upstate New York and so he spent a lot of time in the Adirondack Mountains as a kid, on lakes and hiking.
I was the kind of a kid who was computer nerd, but I was also Boy Scouts
and a lot of time in the outdoors of southern New Jersey and the Pine Barrens and on the coastal marshes.
I would go out and I would hike or ride new bike routes, and I would stop at overlooks and I would
look over the forests, and at the time there were a number of different things
happening, like gypsy moth defoliation and I would ask myself what's causing
these patterns, and you know you could make a map of this and it'd be really
cool to understand what these processes are that are going on that are creating this.
But it is really hard to actually collect data that's representative of
the whole diversity of ecosystems that you see, even within a local region
but certainly when you start to scale up to a national or continental or global scale.
That's the scale at which we can really
test questions about ecosystem sensitivity to climate and how that
changes with latitude, with ecosystem type with climatic extremes.
So much of ecology is... We found this really interesting ecological pattern but it's
specific on, you know this elevation gradient or this time of day or this particular El Nino cycle.
Field data they're really expensive and
logistically difficult to arrange and collect. That's one of the great things
about NEON is that it's collecting field data and other types of information
across a widely distributed set of sites that represent the biomes that we have in the U.S.
NEON collects fundamental ecological data about biogeochemistry,
about the water cycle, about species and biodiversity and the structure of vegetation.
They have flux towers that measure gas exchange and gas uptake.
Then over these different neon sites we have these aerial measurements whether the
lidar or hyperspectral data that we can use to measure a pulse the heartbeat and
lung capacity of ecosystems.
So neon is enabling the collection of data on spatial and temporal scales that
previously were unimaginable for the ecological community.
No individual scientist would be able to collect those data on their own across so many
different sites. And it's available, it's freely available to everybody in the community.
NEON's also a 30 year observatory. It's meant to collect data in these ways for
30 years there's nothing like that out there
Given that most ecology is done on a three-year grant cycle or a five year
PhD timeline, I think having the ability to answer research questions at a really
large Geographic scale but to do it over 30 years, is going to really change the way
we think about some of these questions and some of the answers we thought we
understood, but we're only seeing a really small slice of the puzzle.
In a 3-year study of data collection if you have one anomalous year then you don't
really know what is the real state of an ecosystem. This has been a big challenge for ecology.
I think a challenge that's always present is funding.
We've encountered challenges, in especially our long-term
monitoring sites. All of those sites have had gaps in their funding which have led
to gaps in the data. So many of these sites have gone through multiple
principal investigators which means things get handed off code gets handed
over and things often get lost in translation.
NEON is providing a vision for ecology
There's something about the shared power of these data which I I'm
envisioning them as a catalyst for collaboration. One of the great things
for me about NEON has been it's actually opened up new collaborations as I've
started to work in places that I hadn't previously worked. I'm meeting new people
who might be doing different things but it might overlap with what I'm doing.
I'm super excited about this idea that we can have the same measurements andthe
same protocol with uncertainty quantified for every single variable.
But making sense of this data still requires what we best do as scientists
which is communicate with each other, collaborate with each other, making arguments.
Having high quality data like NEON's is gonna make those arguments crisper, cleaner.
We talk about NEON and it
and the possibility of how it'll change the field but I think it's not going to
change ecology I think it will transform ecology.
Data is online. Virtually all the sites are now operational we're already seeing
papers in my journal that are using NEON data and showing interesting results
across a gradient of NEON sites.
There aren't any other networks like this that
collect so much data, in so many different places, and so many different scales.
For us to be able to ask big questions about ecosystems on our planet and what drives them.
When it comes to the Grand Challenges of things like
climate change and biodiversity, I think NEON is our greatest hope for
being able to answer those questions effectively.
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