Breaking News
| (From AAAS Science Insider) Subra Suresh has been confirmed as the 13th director of the National Science Foundation. The U.S. Senate voted to approve the Massachusetts Institute of Technology engineering dean by unanimous consent late last night before adjourning until 15 November. Suresh, who will serve a 6-year term, succeeds Arden Bement, who stepped down in April 6 months short of the end of his term. Cora Marrett, who has been serving as acting director, will return to her temporary post as NSF deputy director while she awaits Senate approval to hold the position on a permanent basis.
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Erratum
| In the August 2010 update, an article under "NEON on the International Scene" stated that David Schimel had been tapped to lead the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme's (IGBP) Analysis, Integration, and Modeling of the Earth System (AIMES) project. It should have read "David Schimel has been tapped to lead the IGBP AIMES project's task force on global observations."
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NEWS@NEON Fall Edition Published
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The Summer 2010 Edition of NEWS@NEON is now available. This edition includes overviews of:
Also, check out ABC TV20's (Gainesville, FL) news coverage of the pathfinder mission with an interview of AOP Team Lead Brian Johnson.
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Board Elections for 2011 Completed
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The NEON, Inc. bylaws
stipulate that the Board of Directors comprise two groups of Directors:
At-Large and Membership. The latter group are elected by NEON, Inc.'s
institutional member representatives,
while the former group are elected by the Directors then in-office.
Each Director serves a three-year term.
In September, elections were held for the Membership group of Directors for two open seats whose terms run from January 2011 through the end of 2013. Your institutional representatives participated in the electronic voting process, and elected Dr. Katherine McCarter (Executive Director, Ecological Society of America) and Dr. Deborah Goldberg (University of Michigan) (re-elected, second term) to the two open seats.
At the Board of Directors meeting last week (9/22 and 9/23), three At-Large Directors -- Dr. Carol Brewer, Thomas Jorling, and Dr. Margaret Leinen -- were re-elected by the Board to serve their second terms running from 2011 through the end of 2013.
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NEON, Inc. 3rd Annual Membership Meeting
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The USGS generously hosted the NEON, Inc. 3rd Annual Meeting at its headquarters last Friday on 9/24/10. Close to 100 participants (Board members, member institution representatives, Federal officials, consultants, and NEON, Inc. staff) attended the event. We would also like to salute a number of early career scientists who made it to the meeting either with the support of their institutions or through a travel grant administered by NEON, Inc.
The format of the meeting this year was modified in response to feedback to include more interaction time. A major objective of this year's meeting was to solicit input for the long term strategic direction of the NEON, Inc. corporation. The strategic visioning activity was led by Board Member Peggy Strand and the Meridian Institute. Attendees were later divided into breakout groups to give their perspectives on issues related to "Member institutions and NEON sites", "Partnerships, Education, and Outreach", and "Science Mission &
Advancing Ecological Science".
The Roadmap development process does not end there. Attendees will soon be sent an invitation to continue the process of informing how NEON, Inc. should chart our long-term strategy to better serve the environmental sciences community. Please contact your institutional representative if you are interested in providing input.
We also received a lot of excellent feedback that will help us shape next year's annual meeting. We are encouraged by your on-going productive engagement with the NEON staff.
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Recent Awards Made through the Macrosystems Biology Program
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The Macrosystems Biology program (see also below, "Solicitations") will support quantitative, interdisciplinary, systems-oriented research on biosphere processes and their complex interactions with climate, land use, and invasive species at regional to continental scales as well as planning and development activities to enable groups to conduct Macrosystems Biology Research. A list of recent awards made through this program, available on NSF's website, is listed below:
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ASLO Special Session on Ecological Forecasting
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The conveners of a special session on ecological forecasting at the 2011 ASLO meeting (San Juan, Puerto Rico, 13 - 18 February 2011) are soliciting submission of abstracts for oral and poster presentations (due by Oct 11) to the following special session #S41: "Ecological
Forecasting: Progress, Challenges and Prospects".
The session proposal reads (edited for length): "Ecological forecasts, or the prediction of the impacts of physical, chemical, biological, and human-induced change on ecosystems and their components, encompass a wide range of space and time scales, and subject matter. Substantial progress has been made in recent years in developing new marine ecological forecasts that can help guide management and mitigation efforts, but many challenges remain especially in the realm of mechanistic biogeochemical and ecosystem forecasting. Ecological data assimilation techniques are also applicable, though only a few data assimilating ecological forecast models exist today. We invite presentations that highlight recent advances in efforts to forecast marine biogeochemical properties, ecosystem dynamics and individual aquatic species as well as cutting edge techniques to enable the next generation of ecological forecasting models."
If you have any questions please contact the conveners: Raleigh R. Hood (University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science), Christopher W. Brown (NOAA NESDIS), or David S. Green (NOAA NWS).
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NEON at AGU
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NEON will have an exhibit booth at AGU on "NSF Street": a family of major NSF funded initiatives, including the Ocean Observatories Initiative, the National Center for Atmospheric Research, EarthScope, the University National Oceanographic Laboratory System (UNOLS), and others. A number of NEON scientists and educators will also be there presenting at oral and poster sessions. Details will be released as we get closer to December.
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Solicitations of Potential Interest to the NEON Community
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Please click the respective links to check the original source of information. The abbreviated text below may not reflect amendments to the original announcements, and may not reflect the original intent of the solicitation.
The "New" icons refer to recent new announcements (includes announcements for regular solicitations), and not necessarily new programs. These are primarily, though not limited to, NSF solicitations. Not all new announcements are included in the list below.
 Ecology of Infectious Diseases (EID)- Excerpt: The goal of the Ecology of Infectious Diseases (EID) activity is to fund the development of predictive understanding of the transmission dynamics and evolution of infectious agents through the discovery of general principles and processes, and the building of models. To that end, research should focus on understanding the ecological, evolutionary and socio-ecological determinants of transmission by vectors or abiotic agents, the population and evolutionary dynamics of reservoir species, the dynamics of social and economic systems, and transmission to humans, other animals or plants, and recognize that the interactions of disease-causing agents, their hosts, and the environment are usually embedded within complex systems.
- Critical dates: December 15, 2010
- Dynamics of Coupled Natural and Human Systems (CNH)
- Excerpt: The Dynamics of Coupled Natural and Human Systems (CNH) Program supports basic research and related activities that enhance fundamental understanding of the complex interactions within and among natural and human systems. CNH focuses on the complex interactions among human and natural systems at diverse spatial, temporal, and organizational scales. CNH seeks to advance basic knowledge about the system dynamics -- the processes through which systems function and interact with other systems. CNH-supported projects must examine relevant natural AND human systems. Proposals cannot focus solely or largely on either human systems or on natural systems. Projects also must examine the full range of coupled interactions and feedbacks among relevant systems. The arrows in the accompanying figure symbolize these relationships.
- Critical dates: See NSF website
- Advancing Digitization of Biological Collections (ADBC)
- Excerpt: This program seeks to create a national resource of digital data documenting existing biological collections and to advance scientific knowledge by improving access to digitized information (including images) residing in vouchered scientific collections across the United States. The information associated with various collections of organisms, such as geographic distribution, environmental habitat data, phenology, information about associated organisms, collector field notes, tissues and molecular data extracted from the specimens, etc. is a rich resource for providing the baseline from which to further biodiversity research and provide critical information about existing gaps in our knowledge of life on earth.
- Critical dates: December 10, 2010.
- Macrosystems Biology
- Excerpt: 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. Projects should strive to provide a mechanistic understanding of how
multiple scale dynamics contribute to the structure, functioning, and
change of the biosphere, and lead to the development of a more
predictive understanding of ecological change. Proposals should be well
grounded in theory, include novel approaches that will result in a
theoretical framework for a predictive understanding of macroscale
biology, and shows great promise for enhancing basic theoretical
understandings.
- Critical dates: See NSF website.
- Informal Science Education (ISE)
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Excerpt: The ISE program supports innovation in anywhere, anytime, lifelong learning, through investments in research, development, infrastructure, and capacity-building for STEM learning outside formal school settings. Critical dates: Full proposals due: December 7, 2010.
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Key Dates in 2010
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10/6 - 7: NSF BIO Advisory Committee Meeting at NEON Technical Facility (Boulder, CO)
10/14 - 15: AERC Annual Meeting (Washington, DC)
12/12 - 12/17: AGU Meeting in San Francisco
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