December 22, 2011  

Dear NEON, Inc. Institutional Member Representatives and Constituents,

The year of 2011 saw a number of notable achievements.  NEON, Inc. was awarded $18M to initiate construction of the Observatory in FY 2011.  We completed the transition to our new 80,000 sq ft building in Boulder which was formally opened in a ribbon cutting ceremony by Congressman Jared Polis (D-CO, 2nd District), and shortly thereafter visited by NSF Director Dr. Subra Suresh.  NEON also hosted a community event in Sterling, CO to celebrate the completion of NEON's prototype site in April, and in December, we took delivery of the first NEON spectrometer.  To help prepare the community to use the NEON physical and information infrastructure, NSF made close to $20M worth of awards under the Macrosystems Biology program to spur innovation in research on biological systems at regional to continental scales.

Dr. Suresh describes the US science community entering an Era of Observations and an Era of Data and Information.  The NEON physical and information infrastructure is an integral part of that vision, and we are pleased to see the NEON, Inc. membership actively engaged in defining the capabilities of a community aligned with that vision.  This was evident at the Fourth Annual Membership Meeting in Boulder, CO.  Our goal is to evolve these meetings into an annual landmark scientific event where our community gathers to advance the frontier of large-scale ecological sciences.  Five early career scientists (from Arizona State University, Smithsonian Institution, University of Illinois Urbana Champaign, Washington State University, and West Virginia University) were given travel awards to attend this year's meeting.  To mark the inauguration of science-focused annual meetings, pre-meeting workshops were offered on aquatic bathymetry, the NEON airborne platform, and environmental informatics.   We also featured plenaries by Drs. Janet Franklin (Arizona State University), Robert Guralnick (University of Colorado Boulder), and David Schimel on the state of large-scale ecology.  In breakout sessions, some of you took up the challenge of defining complementary infrastructure that may qualify for funding through the NSF Major Research Infrastructure grant program, while another group focused on the science questions enabled by NEON relocatable infrastructure.  The third group discussed the development and support of ecological community models.  Input from this group was captured and synthesized into a white paper submitted for the NSF EarthCube Charette.  Next year we hope to offer, on an experimental basis, an activity facilitated through collaborative web-based technologies that would contribute to an open repository of membership-generated white papers that can be used to advance our community's needs.

Member institutions are also raising awareness of the impacts of rapidly unfolding environmental challenges and the role of our community in understanding those changes.  Five individuals (from Harvard Forest, Science and Engineering Alliance, University of Alabama, University of Idaho, and University of Virginia) attended Climate Science Day on Capitol Hill 2011 in Washington, DC for a workshop on communicating with Congress.  This was followed by visits to Congressional offices in small teams.  Another four travel awardees (from University of Michigan, University of Florida, Utah State University, and Washington State University) have been identified to receive travel funding to attend Climate Science Day 2012.   Earlier this year, selected member representatives were contacted to provide input for a project on using NEON data for policy, with a follow-up webinar summarizing the results of the study.  In addition, the Ecological Society of America (a NEON, Inc. Founding Institution) and NEON, Inc. hosted an afternoon workshop for a group of Washington State University (a NEON, Inc. Founding Institution) IGERT science-policy students. 

Congress, through its FY 2012 appropriations, has signaled the importance of NSF in sustaining American innovation and competitiveness.  With the prospect of financially austere landscapes becoming the norm for the immediate future, we will all continue to face funding challenges.  It is important that you express support for NSF's role of strategically stimulating basic research that connects the science and engineering enterprise with potential economic, societal, and educational benefit.  We also need to champion the NSF Major Research Equipment and Facilities Construction (MREFC) account, which funds NEON and other critical NSF major research infrastructure like the Oceans Observatories Initiative (OOI).  Just as the internet is a critical infrastructure that enables the eBays, Amazons, and Netflixes of today to deliver goods and services, facility-oriented environmental observatories like NEON and OOI will become the infrastructure platforms for launching transformational scientific discovery and innovation.  Twitter co-founder Evan Williams is said to expound the belief that "there are more smart people outside of this (Twitter office) building than inside it."  As we build NEON, the smarts of the community, you, will be the ones advancing scientific discoveries enabled by shared scientific infrastructure.

As you ponder how best to utilize these opportunities for advancing the state of large-scale ecological sciences, we would like to wish you happy holidays, and all the best for a wonderful 2012!

Sincerely, 

Jim MacMahon
Chair of the NEON, Inc. Board of Directors

Thomas Jorling
Acting Chief Executive Officer, NEON, Inc.