National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON)
c/o American Institute of Biological Sciences
1444 I St. NW, Suite 200
Washington, DC 20005
Contact: Dan Johnson, 202/628-1500 x215
fax: 202/628-1509; djohnson@aibs.org

October 25, 2006

NEON Delivers Project Documents to NSF

The National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) staff, in consultation with colleagues in the ecological research community, has prepared five major project documents for delivery to the National Science Foundation (NSF) in advance of the Conceptual Design Review of NEON by an NSF panel the week of 6 November 2006.

The documents included are:

• The Integrated Science and Education Plan (ISEP), which sets forth the NEON vision,
• the Networking and Informatics Baseline Design (NIBD), which describes the cyberinfrastructure that will support and enable NEON,
• the Preliminary Project Execution Plan (PPEP), a document that links the NEON Conceptual Design with methods for deploying integrated instruments, experiments, facilities, and cyberinfrastructure,
• the Project Development Plan (PDP), the roadmap that defines the scope of work and the strategy that will take NEON into its Construction Phase, and
• the Cost Book.

NEON is a continental-scale research platform for discovering and understanding the impacts of climate change, land-use change, and invasives on ecology. It will consist of distributed sensor networks and experiments, linked by advanced cyberinfrastructure to record ecological data and make it available to researchers, decision-makers, and students and teachers.

NEON will serve as a sentinel system for environmental change and as the US terrestrial component of the proposed Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS). It is the first initiative in the biological sciences that is eligible for funding through the NSF Major Research Equipment and Facilities Construction (MREFC) fund.