• Board elections underway.  Elections for three institution member-elected seats on the Board of Directors is underway.  Your institutional representatives will be voting on the slate of candidates between now and September 15 (Thursday).  The results will be announced on September 16 at the annual meeting.
• Fourth Annual NEON, Inc. Membership Meeting (Sep 16, 2011, Boulder, CO).  It is still not too late to register for the meeting.  If you have already registered, please remember to indicate your choice of pre-meeting workshops and/or NEON HQ tours.
• This update contains a higher than usual number of solicitations and announcements of potential interest to the NEON community. 

The center is the newest in a series of synthesis centers funded by NSF over the last 15 years. It is the first of these centers to integrate the natural sciences and social sciences.  Previous centers focused on natural sciences only.  The National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center, known as SESYNC, will be home to research on such issues as water availability, sustainable food production, and the interaction between human activities and ecosystem health.

NIMBioS is now accepting applications for the NIMBioS Investigative Workshop: Disturbance Regimes and Climate-Carbon Feedback, to be held Feb. 13-15, 2012, at NIMBioS. The workshop will bring together disturbance ecologists, biogeochemists, mathematicians, statisticians and computer scientists to discuss var ious issues related to integration of disturbance ecology with biogeochemistry using mathematical and statistical approaches. Application deadline: Nov. 1, 2011. See http://www.nimbios.org for more details.

In Spring 2011, University of Maryland graduate students Alli Barra Srinivas and Eugene (Gene) Russo worked on a project examining potential pathways for NEON data to be utilized as inputs in scientific assessments that ultimately inform policy development and program implementation. The study includes literature reviews and phone interviews with individuals from NEON, Inc. Member Institutions, Federal agencies, and NGOs.  The study uses the Farm Bill to provide context for parts of the analysis.  

Alli and Gene successfully presented and defended their study earlier this year, and have offered to present their findings over a one-hour webinar. If you are interested in attending the webinar, please register at least a week in advance.

Date:  2011/10/4 (Tuesday)
Time:  1pm Eastern / 10am Pacific  
Format:  40 mins presentation + 20 mins Q&A
Registration:  http://goo.gl/l1D05

In a Science March 2010 review of the book "The Fourth Paradigm: Data Intensive Scientific Theory" titled "Sailing on an Ocean of 0s and 1s", former NSF BIO Directorate Assistant Director Dr. James Collins** describes the current scientific data deluge bringing with it the emergence of a "new scientific methodology driven by data intensive problems".

The Fourth Paradigm book, a 2011 February 11 special issue of Science on "Dealing with Data", a 2008 September 4 issue of Nature on "Big data: science in the petabyte era", recent discussions by the National Science Board's Task Force on Data Policies, similar issues being debated by the National Research Council's Board on Research Data and Information, and numerous other developments are harbingers of a future that the environmental / earth sciences community will have a role to play in.  Our community collects and integrates valuable data and information that are essential to forecasting ecological conditions that are integral to the the well-being of society (see also announcement on SESYNC above).  An environmental information commons, together with the tools and infrastructure under active development by various entities (including: DataONE, the Earth Science Information Partners, the USGS Community for Data Integration, and others) will accelerate cutting edge research and enhance the translation of science for societal benefit.

These are some of the elements of NSF Director Dr. Suresh's vision of the "Era of Observation" and the "Era of Data and Information" (see the February 2011 and June 2011 issues).  Earlier this week, NSF released a workshop summary titled "Changing the Conduct of Science in the Information Age".  This November, the NSF Geosciences Directorate and the Office of Cyberinfrastructure are jointly organizing a community event to help formulate strategies for its Earth Cube initiative (see also Geoinformatics solicitation, below) that aims to integrate data and technology in an open, adaptable and sustainable framework. The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation put out a recent call to seek community input on where to invest in data intensive science (comments due mid September).

These are developments that bear the potential of bringing the products of your research (data, workflows, tools, etc) "to the market" for utilization by other scientists, educators, resource managers, and decision makers. However, there are a suite of organizational, cultural, financial, and technical challenges that are being actively worked through in the aforementioned fora.  Browse through the links provided above over the Labor Day weekend, and lend your voice to those discussions!

* The perspectives herein have not been vetted with or endorsed by NSF.  ** During his tenure at NSF BIO, Dr. Collins was instrumental in guiding the development of the NEON program.