National Ecological Observatory Network
| Abbreviation | NEON |
|---|---|
| Type | Nonprofit organization |
| Purpose | Ecological Monitoring |
| Headquarters | Boulder, Colorado |
|
Region served
|
United States |
| Website | www |
National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) is a large facility project operated by Battelle and funded by the National Science Foundation. When completed, NEON will be a continental-scale research platform for discovering and understanding the impacts of climate change, land-use change and invasive species on ecology. NEON will gather long-term data on ecological responses of the biosphere to changes in land use and climate, and on feedback with the geosphere, hydrosphere, and atmosphere.
Battelle, an independent, nonprofit research and development organization, was selected by the National Science Foundation to complete the construction, commissioning and the initial operations of NEON.
The National Science Foundation, the National Science Board and Congress approved funding for NEON in 2011. Funding came from the National Science Foundation. NEON itself is not a funding agency.
NEON, Inc. was the entity in charge of running the NEON project when it first began, but on December 11, 2015, the NSF terminated the NEON, Inc. contract. The NSF conducted a search for a new company to complete the project through the first several months of 2016. In March 2016, Battelle was chosen to complete the construction of the NEON field sites and infrastructure needed to gather data from those sites.
The Vision for NEON is to guide global understanding and decisions in a changing environment with scientific information about continental-scale ecology through integrated observations, experiments and forecasts.
NEON's Mission is to design, implement and operate the first and foremost integrated continental‐scale scientific infrastructure to enable research, discovery and education about ecological change.
NEON will create a new national observatory network to collect ecological and climatic observations across the continental United States, including Alaska, Hawaii and Puerto Rico. The observatory will be the first of its kind designed to detect and enable forecasting of ecological change at continental scales over multiple decades. NEON has partitioned the United States into 20 eco-climatic domains, each of which represents different regions of vegetation, landforms, climate, and ecosystem performance. Data will be collected by field technicians and passive sensors at strategically selected sites within each domain and synthesized into information products that can be used to describe changes in the nation's ecosystem through space and time. NEON data products will be freely available via a web portal.
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