Print PageThe National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) is a national-scale research platform for assessing the impacts of climate change, land-use change, and invasive species on ecosystem structure and function. NEON partitions the United States into 20 ecoclimatedomains. Each domain hosts fully instrumented aquatic sites in permanent (wildland area) and relocatable sites. Relocatable sites aim to capture ecologically significant contrasts within and between domains. There are 36 sites in current definition, including streams and shallow lakes.
At each site the same field collection methods and instruments will be used to record and archive ecological data for at least 30 years. At each site, NEON will support a large suite of aquatic and terrestrial sensor arrays and measurements to provide data on biogeochemistry, surface and groundwater discharge, stream and lake morphology, and air quality. The observatory will also track patterns in aquatic plants and algae, microbes, invertebrates, and fish or other top predators. Data will be gathered from the level of gene to ecosystem at a local to continental scale using standardized field procedures and sample processing.
Results/Conclusions
This effort requires a consistent approach and method to building an aquatic site. Here, we detail the science, engineering, and computing requirements and approaches used to build a NEON Aquatic Site. A prototype site, Arickaree River, Colorado (Domain 10) is currently being built out: we present the progress to date at this site.
