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We hope to see you in San Francisco at AGU!
| This It's that time of the year again -- time to head to San Francisco for the Annual Meeting of the American Geophysical Union! NEON staff will be speaking at town halls, presenting posters, manning the exhibit booth, and talking careers at this year's meeting - please stop by and chat about our plans and how we can be a resource for you.
For specific locations to find NEON staff and events, check out our listings!
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NEON COMPLETES NEW PROTOTYPE SITE
| NEON has completed civil construction of its first production-grade prototype site, located near Sterling, Colorado. The site is located in an agricultural area.
Construction of the prototype site helped NEON facilities and construction staff better understand the overall site construction process, in addition to determining best practices for management and oversight policies. This prototype will also help NEON determine how we will ensure we construct a site using minimum impact construction processes and ensure we maintain the ecological integrity of a site.
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NEON Will 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 toward the MIENS specification as a way to document metadata associated with soil genomes.
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New Technical Video on NEON's Airborne Observation Platform Now Available
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NEON has released a three-minute technical video that discusses plans for airborne data collection and the implications for use of such data.
Another video about the Airborne Observation Platform designed for more general audiences will be released in late December, 2010.
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NEON and NCAR Partner to Model Biosphere/Atmosphere Fluxes
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NEON has begun a new prototype activity in partnership with the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) to develop continental-scale data products that estimate carbon and water fluxes between land surface and the atmosphere. The prototype activity will result in a data assimilation model that will build upon NCAR's Community Land Model and will help improve understanding of the biosphere-atmosphere exchange of water and carbon in North America. A future operational version of the model will utilize data generated by NEON.
Two post-docs with specialized skills will participate in the prototyping activity, with funding and office support provided by both NCAR and NEON.
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ESA - NEON Data Workshop for Students Held This Fall
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The Ecological Society of America (ESA) and NEON, Inc. held an NSF-funded 2.5 day workshop for undergraduate and early graduate students on Nov 4 - 6, 2010 in Chevy Chase, MD. Due to size limitations, 25 students were selected from across the country spanning a range of disciplines.
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.
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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The Latest From the NEON Blog
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The National Ecological Observatory Network is a project sponsored by the National Science Foundation and managed under cooperative agreement by NEON, Inc. |
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