The National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON), funded by the National Science Foundation, is a bold effort to expand horizons in the science of large-scale ecology, building on recent progress in many fields. NEON is a continental-scale ecological observation platform for understanding and forecasting the impacts of climate change, land use change, and invasive species on ecology. NEON science focuses explicitly on questions that relate to grand challenges in environmental science, are relevant to large regions, and cannot be addressed with traditional ecological approaches. NEON’s open access approach to its data and information products will enable scientists, educators, planners and decision makers to map, understand and predict the effects of humans on the Earth and effectively address critical ecological questions and issues. NEON will observe both the human causes and the biological consequences of environmental change, a key and relatively unique feature of the project. Environmental monitoring networks typically observe either the causes of change (such as climate change, air pollution, and land cover change) or the effects of change (such as phenology and the distribution of avian populations). Rarely do environmental networks provide integrated observations of aspects of both cause and effect to allow increased understanding of the underlying processes. Because NEON links cause and effect, it operates as a research system and not as an environmental monitoring program. NEON is a continental scale system that will collect consistent, calibrated data from 60 sites in the continental US, Alaska, Hawaii, and Puerto Rico over 30 years. This proposed organized poster session brings together contributions that describe the site infrastructure, field sampling protocols, remote sensing data collection, data processing, and citizen science efforts during the first year of NEON construction.