The National Ecological Observatory Network: A Tool to Understand Soil-Plant-Atmosphere Interactions.

The National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) is a NSF-funded research facility to monitor the impacts of climate change, land use change, and invasive species on biodiversity and ecosystem function. The Observatory is designed to detect and enable forecasting of ecological change at continental scales over 30 years. NEON will collect standardized measurements of physical, chemical, and ecological components of terrestrial (47 sites) and freshwater (34 sites) ecosystems throughout the US. Each terrestrial site will include an instrumented tower and soil plots where automated measurements of atmospheric and biogeochemical parameters will be made. Additionally point-based measurements of plant biomass and chemistry, soil microbes, ground beetles, mosquitoes, small mammals, birds, and infectious diseases will be made throughout each site. A similar suite of measurements will be made at each aquatic site, including continuous measurements of temperature, conductivity, and water fluxes, as well as nutrient concentrations and biodiversity of plants, algae, microbes, macroinvertebrates, and fish. Imaging spectrometer and LiDAR data from 3 remote-sensing aircraft, as well as land-surface models, will be used to extrapolate the data to the continental scale. All NEON data, as well as sampling protocols and data processing algorithms, will be made freely available via the NEON Data Portal. NEON also includes a range of PI-requestable assets including the third remote-sensing aircraft, mobile tower-based instrumentation, and a wide range of biological archives. The Observatory is currently under construction and scheduled to be fully operational by Fall 2017. Here I provide an overview of the Observatory, an update on the current status of construction and plans for the coming year, and highlight features of the science design that will facilitate research on soil-plant-atmosphere interactions.