Laurel Anderson Department of Botany/Microbiology Ohio Wesleyan University Delaware, OH 43015 740-368-3501 e-mail: ljanders@owu.edu
The National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) is a bold initiative that seeks to transform the science of ecology by collecting and integrating diverse kinds of data at a continental scale, allowing scientists to recognize ecological interactions within and across regions, and make forecasts of ecological change that will be useful to society. The backbone of NEON is a continental network of environmental and biological sensors concentrated at twenty core sites distributed across the United States, one in each of twenty climate domains. However, as clearly recognized in the most recent NEON Integrated Science and Education Plan (ISEP), these twenty sites cannot alone provide an accurate ecological picture of the country. Here we describe how faculty and students at colleges and universities throughout the U.S. could greatly expand the scope and extent of NEON research by forming a network we call College-NEON (or C-NEON). We suggest that these faculty focus on a core component of NEON research that is necessarily addressed in a wide variety of ecological situations on or near their campuses (e.g., different sized land fragments in different climate domains, as described below). College faculty and their students would use the Mobile Relocatable Platforms (MRPs) and/or Fundamental Instrument and Sentinel Units (FIU and FSUs) and work with other NEON ecologists within their domains to establish long-term research programs that compliment core research within the domain. This effort would be coordinated across domains so that faculty at colleges/universities in different parts of the country would work together as colleagues on this research. C-NEON would have two critical outcomes: it would 1) increase the temporal and spatial scale of NEON research and 2) allow college faculty and students to participate in NEON research in ways not otherwise possible. The NEON ISEP indicates that core sites will be placed in relatively undisturbed wild habitat. This is scientifically reasonable in order to provide “benchmark” measurements, but a large percentage of natural land in the US exists in highly disturbed, fragmented habitats. Given the current trajectories of human population growth and urban development, these fragments will constitute the vast majority of our natural habitat in the future. C-NEON can explicitly focus on NEON research questions in such fragmented areas. Our goals in this document are to describe a research program that
will investigate the effects of fragmentation explicitly using NEON tools,
will substantially increase the “footprint” of NEON science, making it more truly continental in scale,
is crafted to encourage participation in NEON by a large number of ecologists, particularly those whose job descriptions, research budgets, or other limitations, prevent them from working personally at one of the core sites, and
is crafted to encourage participation by undergraduate students by focusing on research appropriate for them.