The STREON Experiment: Experiments as accelerators of change in NEON

Background/Question/Methods: The National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) is a national-scale research platform for analyzing and understanding the impacts of climate change, land-use change, and invasive species on ecology. NEON features sensor networks and experiments, linked by advanced cyberinfrastructure to record and archive ecological data for at least 30 years. NEON partitions the United States into 20 ecoclimatic domains.  Each domain hosts one fully instrumented Core Aquatic Site in one wildland area and one Relocatable location, which aims to capture ecologically significant gradients (40 sites total).  Each site includes instrumentation linked by advanced cyberinfrastructure to record and archive ecological data for at least 30 years. At each site, NEON will support a large suite of aquatic and terrestrial sensors and measurements providing data on biogeochemistry, surface and groundwater discharge, stream and lake morphology, and air quality.  The observatory will track patterns in aquatic plants, algae, invertebrates, and fish or other top predators. Data will be gathered from the level of gene to organism at a local to continental scale. 

Results/Conclusions: NEON enables multi-factorial experiments which accelerate predicted environmental change.  The STReam Experimental Observatory Network (STREON) is a long-term, large-scale field experiment that will quantify how nutrient enrichment and reduced consumer diversity interactively influence stream ecosystem biodiversity, biogeochemistry (including nutrient uptake rates), ecohydrology, and production (e.g. whole stream metabolism).