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NEON, Inc.
Membership Update
Issue 2014-03
 
Reminder: Seeking Nominations for Board Election 2014
Board elections nominations process
Each year, NEON, Inc. holds an election for our member institutions to elect individuals to represent our community's interests by serving on the corporation's Board of Directors. The process starts with you submitting the names of individuals who may be interested in running for elections. Nominations close May 1, 2014.
Seeking Your Input on Future Membership Activities
Asking people for input to determine a direction
We seek your input about how you would like to engage with NEON going forward.  In October 2013, NEON held its sixth Annual Membership Meeting in Gainesville, FL. This meeting included a field trip to the Ordway-Swisher Biological Station to see the NEON infrastructure that is in place and providing early NEON data (selected photos of the field trip are available on the membership website).

The field trip and other meeting events afforded rich opportunities for interactions between meeting attendees and local students and faculty. Many also took the opportunity to interact with NEON science, education and field staff, Board Directors, and Science, Technology, and Education Advisory Committee (STEAC) members. The meeting also included an excellent presentation by Christina Staudhammer (University of Alabama) titled "Scaling Managed Forests From Stand to Continent: A Macro-systems Biology Approach and its Linkage to the NEON Observatory Platform," a lively discussion of future engagement between NEON and the scientific community, a reception at the Florida Museum of Natural History, and small workshops on a variety of topics. Our post-meeting survey indicated that participants particularly enjoyed the field trip and workshops.

Attendance by NEON Member Representatives, however, was extremely low, as has been the case the past few years. In an effort to plan activities that best engage scientists, students and other researchers from NEON member institutions, we would appreciate your input about how you would like to engage with NEON going forward.
NEON Science Symposia and Workshops, 2014-2015
Membership Meeting
We request your assistance in developing and planning the next series of NEON Science Symposia and Workshops. The objectives of these meetings are to (i) encourage critical thinking on how to make the best use of forthcoming NEON data, (ii) create opportunities for publishing scholarly papers early using NEON data products, (iii) promote the use of NEON data in education, and (iv) keep NEON science at the forefront of thinking and discussion across the scientific community.

This call for ideas follows two recent successful workshops: (i) The NEON Phenocam Network: Envisioning the Future of Near-Surface Remote Sensing; and (ii) Accelerating the Integration of NEON Data in Isotope Ecology Research. Participants are actively developing reports and manuscripts as a result of these workshops. A workshop on microbial ecology is planned for summer 2014, while another on remote sensing and ecological scaling is planned for this summer/fall.

See the full announcement for details on how to get involved.
Membership Activity: Climate Science Day on Capitol Hill 2014
For the fourth consecutive year, representatives NEON, Inc. member institutions participated in the annual Climate Science Day on Capitol Hill. The purpose of Climate Science Day is to provide a non-partisan opportunity for scientists from a variety of disciplines to build relationships and provide members of Congress access to the best possible climate science information. Alyssa Rosemartin (University of Arziona), Aaron Piņa (Colorado State University), and Ghassan 'Gus' Alaka (Colorado State University) were all awarded travel support to participate in the event held in late January.

Several participants noted this year's conversations on Capitol Hill differed from previous years due to growing Congressional awareness of making data and information more discoverable, accessible, and usable to better understand the impacts of large-scale environmental change. Alaka offered his services as a climate science "data wrangler" for Congressional staffers if they needed help to navigate the arcane arena of models and large climate datasets. Rosemartin brought to bear her knowledge of phenology as an environmental indicator. Piņa offered his skills in modeling the atmospheric transport of pollutants.

Thank you, member institutions, for helping make these annual outreach events possible. And special thanks goes out to Alyssa, Aaron, and Gus for investing time and energy to travel to Washington DC to inform legislators about the science that they do.
Membership Activity: EarthCube End-user Workshop
The NEON community is at the intersection of several geoscience and biological science areas including biogeochemistry, remote sensing, ecohydrology, and lower atmospheric dynamics. The NSF EarthCube initiative aims to develop cyberinfrastructure tools and approaches that will benefit disciplines including those just listed. To that end, the EarthCube Secretariat, hosted by the Arizona State Geological Survey, organized an EarthCube workshop in Washington DC on March 18 aimed at scientists who would benefit from having a voice in the evolution of EarthCube.

In addition to announcements made by the EarthCube Secretariat and other collaborators, an announcement was sent to member institution representatives to solicit participation. Individuals from member institutions (not all associated directly with the NEON community) present at the workshop include: University of Florida, University of Kansas, University of South Carolina, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Boston University, Colorado State University, Ecological Society of America, George Mason University, Oregon State University, Stroud Water Research Center.

The next EarthCube event is the All-hands meeting in Washington DC (2014-06-24 - 2014-06-26). This meeting will bring together project institutions, partners, collaborators, and scientists from across the globe to share their progress and experience with EarthCube thus far, and discuss and plan activities for the upcoming year. Session proposals for the meeting are due Friday 2014-05-09 5pm PDT.
White House's Climate Data Initiative
On 2014-03-19, the White House launched the Climate Data Initiative (CDI), part of President Obama's Climate Action Plan launched in June 2013. The Climate Action Plan is the Administration's blueprint for domestic and international efforts to prepare for the impacts of climate change and reduce carbon emissions. The CDI is meant to spur the innovative use of open machine-readable government data to help communities deal with the impacts of climate change.

NEON was invited to the CDI launch, courtesy of the White House and the Foundation for Earth Science (the Foundation is the governance entity of the Federation of Earth Science Information Partners ESIP: of which NEON, Inc. is a member institution). In addition to announcing the web portal climate.data.gov, the event also showcased the role of the private sector in accelerating the innovative use of open data through public-private partnerships. Dr. John Holdren, President Obama's science advisor and Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, opened the event to a packed room of invited guests in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building's auditorium. Notable speakers included John Podesta (Counselor to President Obama), Jack Dangermond (Founder and CEO of Esri), and Kathryn Sullivan (recently confirmed NOAA Administrator).

In earlier events, Dr. Sullivan highlighted the role environmental intelligence, which she defined as "timely, actionable information, developed from reliable and authoritative science, that gives us foresight about future conditions". Once fully commissioned, NEON will also play a role in providing the data and information to advance the type of continental-scale science that will ultimately be useful for decision-making and resource management. Regardless of whether NEON's calibrated or gridded-model data products are incorporated into climate.data.gov or the upcoming ecosystems.data.gov, we anticipate those data products to be widely used in innovative spatio-temporal analyses: from regression analyses to complex data assimilation models.

Those analyses will help inform questions of broader societal-relevance, including ameliorating the impacts of climate change. The ongoing work by the informatics community on provenance ("history") and scientific workflows will help provide that linkage between NEON's data and information and how it impacts societal benefit areas like agriculture, health, and energy.
Solicitations of Potential Interest to the NEON Community
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.
In This Issue
Board Elections Nominations
Future Membership Activities
NEON Symposia / Workshops
Climate Science Day 2014
EarthCube Science End-Users
Climate Data Initiative
Solicitations

We're Hiring 


Admjinistrative Assistant I

Sr Staff Scientist (Ecologist)

Assistant Director (Terrestrial Instrumentation)

Assistant Director (Aquatic Sciences)

Senior Science Technician (Terrestrial Ecology)

Software Engineer - Web Applications

Software Engineer

Maximo Applications Analyst

Software Applications Engineer-Multiple Positions

Software Quality Assurance Engineer

Network Engineer I

Senior Help Desk Technician

Contracts Administrator II

Human Resources Assistant

Senior Human Resources Advisor

Production Demand Planner

Director of Production

Production Engineer- Multiple Positions

Assembly Lab Technician

Senior Assembler

Manufacturing Engineer

RAMS Functional Safety Engineer

RAMS Engineer Reliability

Associate Scientist

Field Construction Supervisor

Field Installation Technician -Multiple Positions

Field Operations Manager - Manhattan, KS

Field Operations Manager - Fresno, CA

Field Operations Manager - Fairbanks, AK

Field Technician I, II, or III - Salt Lake City, UT - Multiple Positions

Field Technician I, II, or III - Guanica, Puerto Rico - Multiple Positions

Field Operations - Seasonal Positions

Key Dates in 2014


May 14 - 15:  NEON, Inc. Board Meeting (Washington DC area)

June 24 - 26:  EarthCube All-hands Annual Meeting (Washington, DC)

July 8 - 11:  ESIP Summer Meeting (Frisco, CO)

Aug 10 - 15:  ESA Annual Meeting

October 23 - 24:  NEON, Inc. Board Meeting
 
Dec 15 - 19: AGU Fall Meeting

NEON Informational Toolbox 


Data Product Catalogs

Data Policy

NEON Strategy Document

Brochure

Site Prospectus

Overview Video

Airborne Observation Video 

Past Five Issues


2014-02

2014-01

2013-12

2013-11

2013-10
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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, IncNSF logo