A plan for public participation in NEON to inspire ecological understanding across the continent

Background/Question/Methods

The National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) is planning educational resources and programs that will engage the public with continental-scale ecological science. NEON’s education goals include (1) promoting and facilitating public understanding of ecological science, (2) providing tools for students, educators, scientists, and decision-makers to use NEON data to make informed decisions about ecological issues, (3) educating the next generation of ecologists to understand complex ecological systems and their associated changes, and applying this integrated knowledge to societal needs, and (4) enhancing diversity within the ecological community. 

Results/Conclusions

Education products such as online learning modules, citizen science projects, and workshops, will engage diverse audiences and contribute to raising ecological literacy in the United States. NEON’s commitment to integrating science and education will enable a range of innovative learning experiences that actively engage learners in “doing science.”

In an effort to engage the public with the NEON project, we are planning to develop web-based tools for understanding and visualizing NEON data within the web portal that will be built to house NEON data. The portal will provide avenues for research scientists to access NEON data directly, and avenues for the public, students, and teachers to access tools for guided explorations of NEON data. Social media tools within the web portal will encourage interaction within and between groups such as educators, scientists, students, policymakers and the general public.

NEON will also facilitate citizen science experiences that allow the public, students, and teachers to participate in aspects of ecology research. The NEON Education staff has been developing a long-range strategy for citizen science while we are prototyping new tools developed as part of Project BudBurst, a national scale project in which citizens make and report observations of phenological changes in plants. Citizen participants report their observations online, and a prototype application and text message system, developed in collaboration with UCLA CENS, allow citizens to report observations from mobile phones. Over the next several years, NEON will grow both web-based access to ecology information and citizen science opportunities, engaging diverse audiences with ecological data.