An Update for the SSSA Community: The National Ecological Observatory Network's Soil Sampling Design.

The goal of the NEON Terrestrial Observation System is to conduct co-located measurements of key environmental processes and organismal taxa at the continental scale in order to understand their responses to changes in climate, land use/land cover, and invasive species.  At the 2012 SSSA Meeting, we presented draft sampling designs for soil physical properties, microbial communities, and biogeochemistry across NEON’s 60 sites.  We incorporated feedback from the session discussion that followed into our sampling design approaches and protocols that NEON field operations staff members are now beginning to implement.  The primary suggestions by session attendees included recommendations to (1) sample the same chemical constituents (carbon, nitrogen, and other nutrients) consistently through ecosystem pools and fluxes (e.g., deposition, soils, foliage, roots, and surface waters); (2) incorporate measurements of soil-water into the design in order to quantify inorganic nutrients indicative of ecosystem status, such as nitrate and sulfate in forests recovering from acid rain deposition; (3) measure carbon in both the fine (< 2 mm) and coarse (> 2 mm) fractions of soil cores collected at NEON sites; and (4) measure anions and cations individually in soil samples rather than as bulk cation exchange capacity.  In this presentation, we discuss the recommendations that we were able to incorporate into sampling designs, the logistical and budgetary constraints that affected our decisions, and the current version of the sampling design that is being implemented.  This presentation will provide an understanding of the “research backbone” that NEON will provide to the scientific community to conduct further detailed studies at local to continental scales.