Key observations for long-term ecological understanding of urban environments

Background/Question/Methods

NEON is the first of emergent global ecological observatories.  Its observational designs are complex, addressing biodiversity, biogeochemistry, climate change, ecohydrology, infectious disease, invasive species and land use change through a cause and effect paradigm that embodies a scaling strategy of these quantities from landscape-to-region-to-continent.  It does this through site based, terrestrial and aquatic measurements linked to remote sensed products.  NEON has 96 sites across the US ecoclimatic regions and in ecosystems that represent key, scalable, ecological understandings and embed the ability to address regionally important questions.  A sub-set of NEON sites addresses urban-to-exurban environments.  The selection of these sites embodies different and representative urban structures, development patterns and cultural settings; Burlington MA, Ponce PR, Bozeman MT, Loch Leven MT, Phoenix AZ, and Salt Lake City UT.  Integrated measurement designs are relatively straightforward for natural or managed ecosystems.  We ask however, which ecological processes and controls are important in the urban environment and how they can provide an integrated and scalable understanding among urban and natural sites alike?  For example, there is not even an ecological means to classify urban environments, like we can with natural ecosystems.

Results/Conclusions

Urban ecology is still a nascent science.  As a product from our first year of construction, we describe the engagement of the research community, their input and the challenges we have identified to develop an integrated NEON urban design and their associated data products.  We discuss the challenges we face when designing measurements and dataproducts among extremely contrasting ecological structure and function.  We present the difficulties of implementing such designs, e.g., permitting, non-vegetative canopies, aerial flyovers, and linking biotic processes to abiotic controls.  Finally, we examine the use of popular metrics, such as population density and demography, physical structure, energy balance, amount of biomass, and scales of spatial heterogeneity in a case study.