Utilizing NEON Resources to Enhance Research in Soil Science.

Construction of the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) will be complete at the end of 2017 and then collect data for the following three decades. NEON’s design incorporates numerous freely available data streams and archived samples from 47 terrestrial sites (~1/3 co-located with aquatic monitoring sites) across a wide range of ecosystems and soil types in the continental United States. Each terrestrial site is anchored by an instrumented tower continuously streaming ecologically relevant data (e.g. eddy covariance, radiation, temperature) and a host of surrounding soil measurements. Within the airshed of each tower is an array of five soil plots containing profiles of soil temperature, soil moisture, and CO_2. In addition to instrument based measurements, soil samples will be collected from 10-15 locations across the site and analyzed for a range of biological, chemical, and physical parameters. Beyond data, NEON provides access to infrastructure (e.g. onsite power) and archived soil samples to facilitate research. This talk will highlight NEON data and samples relevant to advancing soil science and provide examples of current National Science Foundation funded projects leveraging NEON to test hypotheses and scale inferences.