It's Prototyping/Development Season at NEON!
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This issue of News @NEON is chock full of information about the latest prototyping and development activities taking place as we continue to await news on Congressional appropriation.
We're excited to announce that we recently began construction on a second, production-grade prototype site which will eventually serve to help NEON staff test the capabilities of a fully operational site.
Our staff have been very busy as summer moves into fall. In this newsletter, we'll fill you in on three recent NEON activities. The Airborne Observation Platform and Fundamental Sentinel Unit staff just returned from a pathfinder event in Florida to test plans for linking airborne and ground-based measurements. Our engineering department is hard at work devising methods for safely collecting data at a distance and in remote locations. And Headquarters has been hosting a number of groups for meetings, including a recent meeting with the FORECAST Research Coordination Network.
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NEW PROTOTYPE SITE UNDERWAY
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NEON has begun construction of its first production-grade prototype
site, to be located near Sterling, Colorado. The prototype site will
eventually serve to help NEON staff test the capabilities of a fully
operational site. Please keep checking back for updates as construction progresses! > Read More
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| Bridging the Gap From Land to Sky |
Prototyping events during the last three weeks have been integral to
establishing a clear and consistent link between NEON organismal and
airborne measurements, and are a critical step toward enabling future
NEON users to obtain the most complete information possible about a NEON
site from the ground to the sky. From mid-August through the first week of September, staff from NEON's
Airborne Observation Platform (AOP) and Fundamental Sentinel Unit (FSU)
science teams headed to Florida to prototype planned methods for
collecting and scaling data from the organismal level to satellite-based
remote sensing level.
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Grapes, Vines and Towers: A Look at the Engineering Behind a NEON Site
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Since NEON's inception, NEON engineering staff have been hard at work
designing, testing and deploying technology that will result in an
efficient, safe and reliable NEON site. But how easy is it to build a reliable remote network
data collection system delivering information in real-time that could
encounter anything from subzero temperatures to curious deer?
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FORECAST RCN Convenes at NEON
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NEON recently hosted the first in a series of
NSF-funded Forecasting
Of Resources and Environmental Changes Using Data Assimilation Science and
Technology (FORECAST) Research Coordination Network (RCN)
annual meetings at NEON headquarters in Boulder. Three
working groups worked to develop community capabilities for forecasting
infectious diseases, forest dynamics, and biogeochemical cycles. The workshop
was co-organized by Yiqi Luo, U. Oklahoma; Jim Clark, Duke U.; Shannon LeDeau, Cary
Institute of Ecosystem Study; Kiona Ogle, U. Wyoming; and David Schimel, NEON.
The FORECAST network will
(1) involve students, post-docs, and early-career scientists to enhance the
development and propagation of new methodologies, (2) develop web-based data
portals for scientists to share techniques and ideas, (3) stimulate
interactions among ecologists, computer scientists, statisticians, and
mathematicians, and (4) provide broad multidisciplinary training for minority
students and post-docs on data assimilation and ecological forecasting. The
full abstract for the project is available HERE.
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Reminder: Macrosystems Biology Call for Proposals
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NSF invites proposals from interdisciplinary teams of scientists to
conduct innovative, integrated, systems-oriented "macrosystems biology"
research to detect, understand and forecast the consequences of climate
and land use change and invasive species on the biosphere at regional to
continental scales. Proposals should address the scales where the
ecological research challenges are the greatest and where research has
the greatest potential to transform the field of ecology by addressing
scaling issues that have long hindered development of large-scale
ecology.
Please send questions to macrosystems@neoninc.org.
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