| New NEON, Inc. Board Directors |
We are pleased to announce the results of the recent Board elections that member representatives participated in. Katherine McCarter (Ecological Society of America) and Jack Stanford (University of Montana) have been re-elected and elected (respectively) to a three-year term on the Board of Directors starting January 2014. We would like to thank everybody who submitted names for the election slate, as well as individuals who were contacted by the Board's governance committee, as they weaved together an election slate representative of our community. In particular, we would like to thank Bryan Pijanowski, Crystal Schaaf, and Jorge Soberon for their willingness to invest their time to represent the community's needs.
The Board also elected Deborah Goldberg (University of Michigan) to serve the rest of Scott Ollinger's term on the Board. Scott stepped down as a Board Director (representing the University of New Hampshire) when he accepted the position of NEON Observatory Director. |
| Opportunity: NEON Internship Program |
Designed to provide enthusiastic undergraduates with real-world experience in their field, the NEON Internship Program is a summer work experience at our headquarters in Boulder, CO. Applications are due January 15, 2014.
NEON is an interdisciplinary organization, and we accept students from a variety of disciplines (e.g., Engineering, Science, Computing). NEON interns are involved with a variety of projects, from helping to design sensor assemblies to testing sampling protocols and analyzing data. See our How to Apply page for more information on this year's projects.
We strongly encourage students from historically under-represented groups in science and engineering to apply. We recruit at minority-serving institutions and organizations. Our program is designed to promote future student success through mentoring, leadership training and various networking activities. |
| Opportunity: Annual Climate Science Day 2014 |
Following on from the resounding success of Climate Science Day (CSD) on Capitol Hill 2011, 2012, and 2013, NEON, Inc. would like to announce an opportunity for up to four individuals to engage in a training session on communicating with Congress. The event starts with a training session (Tuesday January 28, 2013), followed by a visit to Capitol Hill (Wednesday January 29, 2013) to meet with your legislators and other Members of Congress in multi-disciplinary teams led by representatives from organizing institutions.
NEON, Inc. is looking for individuals to effectively communicate the impacts of large-scale environmental changes on natural resources and the complex interaction between climate and ecosystems. Limited travel assistance is available. Early career scientists are encouraged to apply.
This event DOES NOT subscribe to any particular policy course or action. As such, Federal employees may participate in this event. Applications are due by 2013-12-09 (Monday), please see the CSD 2014 website for details. The website also includes links to articles and blog entries about past participants' experiences. |
| Opportunity: PalEON Summer Course |
PalEON (the PaleoEcological Observatory Network: awarded under the NSF Macrosystems Biology program) is offering a summer course: Assimilating Long-Term Data into Ecosystem Models (August 17-23, 2014). The course will provide 20 graduate students and postdocs with intensive training in the emerging tools used to estimate the signal and uncertainty in historical and paleoecological data, and assimilate both signal and uncertainty into the current suite of terrestrial ecosystem models.
NEON, Inc. will be provide up to two travel awards (airfare only: no other costs are covered) to individuals from member institutions in good standing. Early career scientists are encouraged to apply. Click here for details on how to apply. |
| International Symposium Explores Long-Term Phenological Monitoring |
NEON and the National Science Foundation sponsored a three-day symposium in Boulder, Colorado from October 9th - 11th to convene a group of innovative researchers to envision the future of near-surface remote sensing and phenological monitoring. The purpose of this symposium was to establish standards across a national network of phenocams that can be more widely adopted by other national and international monitoring efforts.
Workshop objectives included: identifying key scientific questions that can be answered with phenocam and near remote sensing data and the primary end users of those data sets, discussing what hardware/software, data collection and processing protocols, and metadata standards are needed to ensure efficient and effective delivery data to end users, and outlining how NEON can contribute to engendering a wider international network of phenocam and near remote sensing networks and their derived data products. Check out our website for more details. |
| Joint European-U.S. Observatory Planning Continues at NEON |
The second annual COOPEUS (COOPeration EU and U.S.) strategic planning meeting was held at NEON HQ in Boulder, CO in late September to continue the development of strategies for fostering interoperability between partner observatories in the U.S. and Europe. The NEON interoperability framework utilizes concepts like linking joint science questions to requirements, traceability of measurements to known standards or best community practices, developing algorithmic procedures, and informatics (see also "Developments in Informatics", below).
Meeting attendees included representatives from the European Union (FP7) and the National Science Foundation, designated leaders from the respective observatories, and other partner organizations including Future Earth, EarthCube, NOAA, DataOne, ICSU, and GEOSS. Check out our website for more details. |
| Developments in Informatics | |
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| Opportunity: 2014 Jefferson Science Fellows |
The National Academies is pleased to announce a call for nominations and applications for the 2014 Jefferson Science Fellows program. Initiated by the Secretary of State in 2003, this fellowship program engages the American academic science, technology, engineering and medical communities in the design and implementation of U.S. foreign policy. Jefferson Science Fellows (JSF) spend one year at the U.S. Department of State or the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) for an on-site assignment in Washington, D.C. that may also involve extended stays at U.S. foreign embassies and/or missions.
The fellowship is open to tenured, or similarly ranked, academic scientists, engineers and physicians from U.S. institutions of higher learning. Nominees/applicants must hold U.S. citizenship and will be required to obtain a security clearance. The deadline for 2014-2015 program year applications/nominations is January 13, 2014. To learn more about the Jefferson Science Fellowship and to apply, visit the JSF website. |
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.  Decadal and Regional Climate Prediction using Earth System Models (EaSM) - Excerpt: The EaSM funding opportunity enables interagency cooperation on one of the most pressing problems of the millennium: climate change and how it is likely to affect our world. The EaSM-3 solicitation focuses primarily on the following specific areas of interest related to decadal scales: (i) Research that has the potential to dramatically improve predictive capabilities; (ii) Prediction and attribution studies; (iii) Development and applications of metrics, methods, and tools for testing and evaluating climate and climate impact predictions and characterizing their uncertainty.
- Critical Dates: 2013-12-23
- FAQ for NSF SEES Fellows Solicitation
- Excerpt: FAQ. There is a critical need to develop the workforce in the area of sustainability science and engineering. Through SEES Fellows, NSF seeks to advance science, engineering, and education to inform the societal actions needed for environmental and economic sustainability and sustainable human well-being while creating the necessary workforce to address these challenges. The program's emphasis is to facilitate investigations that cross traditional disciplinary boundaries and address issues of sustainability through a systems approach, building bridges between academic inquiry, economic growth, and societal needs.
- Critical Dates: See NSF website
- Long Term Research in Environmental Biology (LTREB)
- Excerpt: The Long Term Research in Environmental Biology (LTREB) Program supports the generation of extended time series of data to address important questions in evolutionary biology, ecology, and ecosystem science. Research areas include, but are not limited to, the effects of natural selection or other evolutionary processes on populations, communities, or ecosystems; the effects of interspecific interactions that vary over time and space; population or community dynamics for organisms that have extended life spans and long turnover times; feedbacks between ecological and evolutionary processes; pools of materials such as nutrients in soils that turn over at intermediate to longer time scales; and external forcing functions such as climatic cycles that operate over long return intervals.
- Critical Dates: Preliminary Proposal: Jan 30, 2014
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Key Dates in 2013
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Dec 9 - Dec 13: AGU Fall Meeting |
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