NEON's AOP Team to Get Stimulus Funding for New Technology

The Airborne Observation team at NEON will receive stimulus money to develop a new imaging spectrometer to study ecosystems from aircraft, a significant advancement for the field of ecological research.

The team will receive an award totaling almost $10 million from the National Science Foundation, which is supported via the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), to develop airborne technology that will provide opportunities for research previously unavailable to the general U.S. science community. The airborne imaging spectrometer will be used to study vegetation growth, land use and invasive species across the U.S., providing a clearer picture of the state of the continent’s ecosystems to scientists.

The imaging spectrometer is a critical component of NEON’s planned Airborne Observation Platform (AOP), which contains other airborne instruments such as a waveform LiDAR instrument and a high-resolution digital camera.

“This is a truly exciting opportunity for NEON scientists to develop a new technology that will advance the field of ecological research,” said Dr. Brian Johnson, Team Lead for the AOP. “Now, not only will NEON provide data and the infrastructure for data collection, but we can also contribute a brand new method for collecting important ecological data, as well.”

The Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) will be responsible for building and testing the imaging spectrometer. JPL developed the original concept of imaging spectroscopy in the 1970s and has continued to develop state-of-the-art airborne imaging spectrometers for land surface and ecological research.

With the additional data provided by the imaging spectrometer, the AOP system will surpass existing systems in ability to produce quantitative ecological information about climate change, land use change and invasive species impacts on ecology. An example of a continental-scale issue impacting ecology that can be analyzed using the AOP platform is the distribution of, effects from, and recovery from the Mountain Pine Beetle in Colorado.

“NEON’s Airborne Observation Platform is the key link between local measurements and continental-scale ecology, thus allowing us to clearly understand the impact of large-scale issues such as climate change on our natural resources,” said Dave Schimel, CEO of NEON, Inc.

The team will start to build the spectrometer in early 2010, and production is expected to take approximately two years. A test flight over a NEON site using similar instrument technologies is planned for around Summer 2010. The flight is intended to produce test data that will help the AOP team determine how to best use their new system.

View press release.