| Editorial | The Board and staff of NEON, Inc. would like to wish you Happy Thanksgiving! Despite the holiday season, we are still busily hiring, so don't forget to check out our open positions posted on the right-hand-side "We're Hiring" tool bar of each monthly update. Starting January 2011, we are pleased to offer monthly NEON overview webinars to our member institutions. Member institutions West Virginia University, the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science (UMCES), and the University of California Merced are mentioned in various contexts in this edition of the update.
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ESA - NEON Data Workshop for Students
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The Ecological Society of America (ESA) and NEON, Inc. organized a NSF funded 2.5 day workshop for undergraduate and early graduate students (Nov 4 - 6, 2010, National 4H Youth Conference Center, Chevy Chase, MD). The objectives of the workshop were to explore how visualization tools and technology can serve as an interface for students to interact with environmental and social data, demonstrate how regional scale data can inform environmental decision making at local and/or regional levels, and gain awareness of communication issues when presenting research findings to the general public. ESA received over a hundred applications for the workshop. Due to size limitations, 25 students were selected from across the country spanning a range of disciplines.
Workshop participants were given an introduction to the freeware Quantum GIS (QGIS). Using QGIS, participants worked in teams and utilized Potomac basin geospatial and point-time-series data to communicate a focal ecological issue played out within the context of the region's socio-economic landscape. Highlights of the workshop included an evening with Walter Boynton (University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science - UMCES) who engaged students in a sweeping narrative of the historical, ecological, and socio-economic aspects of the Chesapeake Bay. To give students an appreciation for the rigors involved in the production of public scientific data, the workshop included a field trip to a USGS stream gauging station at Rock Creek National Park. Representatives from the USGS, the National Park Service, and the Montgomery County Department of Environmental Protection explained the series of steps that started with field campaigns and ended with the release of free public data. Students were also given the opportunity to interact with a career panel to better understand the options available to them after graduation and how the types of skills acquired at the workshop factor into their long-term career prospects.
ESA and NEON, Inc. would like to acknowledge Alan Collins (WVU), Bill Dennison (UMCES), Andrew Elmore (UMCES), and David Kirschtel for their excellent work as facilitators and mentors for workshop participants. We would also like to thank the USGS, NPS, and Montgomery County DEP representatives who braved the chill to engage with a very motivated cohort of students. Other contributors include: Walter Boynton, Keith Williams, Rich Pouyat, Phyllis Pouyat-Thibodeau, and Tim Carruthers.
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| NEON Monthly Overview Webinars Start Rolling in January 2011 |
Starting January 10, 2011 and every second Monday of each month, we will be offering free monthly NEON overview webinars for individuals from member institutions. The webinars will run approximately 60 minutes comprising a short presentation followed by a Q&A. The dates for these webinars will be posted on the membership page of the NEON website, and also in email updates under the right-hand-side "Key Dates" tool bar. Subject to demand, a reminder for such webinars will be announced every quarter via these email updates.
Date: Every second Monday of each month starting 1/10/2011
Time: 3pm Eastern / 12noon Pacific / 10am Hawaii
Format: 60 mins presentation + Q&A
Registration: Details forthcoming
Platform: WebEx (available for Windows and MacOS platforms, as well as on some smart phones)
Advanced registration is required (details forthcoming). Due to technical constraints, participation is limited to the first 24 registrants. Multiple attendees at a given physical location (i.e. a single internet session) may register just once as a group. For member institutions who wish to arrange for a webinar at some other time for a group of participants, please contact Brian Wee. |
NEON to Adopt Community Standards for Soil Microbe Samples
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NEON microbial ecologist Rachel Gallery and the University of Colorado's Robert Guralnick (who serves on the NEON Data Services Working Group: a group of external experts who advise NEON on data and information issues), together with a number of other scientists, co-authored a paper highlighted in Nature Precedings titled "The Minimum Information about an ENvironmental Sequence (MIENS) specification" (Posted Nov 16, 2010) (http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/npre.2010.5252.2).
The authors propose the MIENS standard: a reporting guideline for phylogenetic and functional genes based on the "Minimum Information about a Meta Genome Sequence" specification promulgated by the Genomic Standards Consortium. The motivation for MIENS stems partially from the lack of contextual information associated with genomic datasets. Associated information like geographic location, sampling time, habitat, and experimental procedures often cannot be easily retrieved, but are nevertheless essential for analysis in a context other than intended by the original investigator. With our collective capacity to generate voluminous amounts of public data using high throughput technologies, it becomes essential for such data to be adequately described so that they may be used across a wide range of analyses.
As part of our prototyping activities, NEON has been collaborating with external experts on defining protocols for microbial soil sampling, microbial genomic assays, and disseminating those assay data for community use. NEON is looking towards the MIENS specification as a way to document metadata associated with soil genomes.
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NEON STEAC Meets in Boulder, CO (11/15/10 - 11/17/10)
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The NEON Science, Technology, and Education Advisory Committee (STEAC) met in Boulder earlier this month. The NEON STEAC provides advice and analysis on strategic scientific and educational issues, and related technical and community issues. The current group, chaired by Stanford's Chris Field, advises the NEON, Inc. CEO/NEON PI and Chair of the NEON, Inc. Board of Directors. The STEAC Chair and members, selected by the CEO and Board Chair, are approved by the Board for 3-year terms. |
Univ. of California Merced Ecologist Eric Berlow on TED
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Eric Berlow, who at one point in time was the University of California Merced's institutional representative to NEON, Inc., is featured in a 4 minute TED video titled "How complexity leads to simplicity". TED is a small nonprofit devoted to "Ideas Worth Spreading". It started out as a conference bringing together people from three worlds: Technology, Entertainment, Design. TED conferences bring together the world's most fascinating thinkers and doers who are challenged to give talks on a wide range of topics.
In this talk, Eric talks about complexity and the power of good visualization tools to reveal the essence of complex systems. He also espouses the need to step back and examine the interactions between components of a complex system. Eric then uses the example of the intricate and complex task of rebuilding Afghanistan to illustrate some of the lessons.
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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 indicate 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.  Dear Colleague Letter: Unsolicited Proposals at the Interface of the Biological, Mathematical and Physical Sciences - Excerpt: The Directorate for Biological Sciences (BIO) and the Directorate for Mathematical and Physical Sciences (MPS) recognize that it is vital for biological, mathematical, and physical scientists to increase their collaborations, both in new research efforts and in ongoing research projects, to advance the frontiers of discovery and innovation. While many strong, vibrant interactions currently exist between the two directorates, this letter is to remind our research communities that MPS and BIO strongly encourage proposals from interdisciplinary research teams that involve collaborations among investigators from the biological, mathematical, and physical sciences and foster new interactions that span interfaces between MPS and BIO.
- Critical Dates: See NSF website.
- Major Research Instrumentation program: Instrument Acquisition or Development
- Excerpt: The Major Research Instrumentation Program (MRI) serves to increase access to shared scientific and engineering instruments for research and research training in our Nation's institutions of higher education, museums, science centers, and not-for-profit organizations. This program especially seeks to improve the quality and expand the scope of research and research training in science and engineering, by providing shared instrumentation that fosters the integration of research and education in research-intensive learning environments.
- Critical Dates: Jan 27, 2011
- 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.
- Informal Science Education (ISE)
- 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
| 12/12 - 12/17: AGU Meeting in San Francisco
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