Sep 2022
A Message from Chief Scientist & Observatory Director Dr. Paula Mabee
Hello again! Across the Observatory, our field sites are well into their late field season, and in some cases seeing the colors begin to change as Autumn arrives!

It has been a whirlwind of a summer with many in-person meetings and getting out into the community. In August, many NEON staff attended the first in-person ESA meeting in 3 years. More recently, much of NEON leadership including myself returned from the LTER All Scientists Meeting in California, where we had fantastic conversations and ideas with researchers from across the U.S.

Also in September, the National Science Foundation held their Large Facilities Workshop for research infrastructure right here in Boulder, Colorado. The National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), the Geodetic Facility for the Advancement of Geoscience (GAGE), the National Solar Observatory (NSO), and NEON co-hosted the event. I was so pleased to see all these networks and observatories coming together for this opportunity to collaborate and talk in the same space, and I'm looking forward to seeing the fruits of those talks!

NEON is always working to bring science, data, and resources to you. As such we have launched a new Science Seminar Series, and the associated Data Skills Webinars begin just next week on October 4. Please learn more about those here and register to learn about NEON Science! We have many more updates for our users and communities - please explore this newsletter to learn more about what we are up to this season.

As always, I hope this finds you safe and well!

Sincerely,
Paula
USING NEON DATA
Dozens of individuals and teams have participated in the Ecological Forecasting Initiative Research Coordination Network (EFI-RCN)’s NEON Ecological Forecasting Challenge, which challenges people to create ecological forecasts using data from the NEON program. Educators across the country are using the Challenge with their undergraduate and graduate students.

Share Your NEON Paper!
Do you have a recently published paper that uses NEON data, samples, or resources? Let us know - we can share it or write about it! Fill out our webform to get started.
DOMAIN DIGEST

This summer, many of our Domains hosted tours and events to give visiting researchers and students a glimpse into our work. Learn about an RCN workshop, tours of creeks in Massachusetts and Texas, and university students exploring our AOP aircraft.

NEON NEWS
OTHER RECENT BLOGS
Our "Voices in Ecology" blog series aims to share the invaluable contributions to ecological research from scientists who come from unusual paths and diverse backgrounds across NEON and the U.S. We asked Puerto Rican-born Wilmarie Plaza-Muniz, Field Ecologist with the NEON program in the Atlantic Neotropical Domain, to share about her work with the national project, her path into ecology, and how her heritage and passions inform her current work.

This summer, more than 3500 ecologists gathered in Montréal for the 2022 ESA/CSEE joint meeting. We were thrilled to participate and have the opportunity to meet NEON data users (and prospective data users) face to face - here are some highlights!

Researchers took a tour of NEON's Airborne Observation Platform this summer when it visited Domain 02 in Virginia. Read this guest post by LENS RCN!

Janelle Hakala, a NEON instrument technician and a NEON-TEX Community Science Fellow, worked with Wildlands Restoration Volunteers in Colorado to develop a long-term monitoring plan modeled on the NEON plant protocols.


IN MEDIA
NASA Earth Observatory, Notes From The Field, August 31, 2022

Down To Earth, August 24, 2022

Florida Museum, August 23, 2022

CU Earth Lab, August 4, 2022

University of Alaska Fairbanks, August 2, 2022


CURRENT JOB OPENINGS
RESOURCES, UPDATES, EVENTS, & OPPORTUNITIES
UPDATES
From time to time, we post important news on our website about our data products, with topics ranging from availability to quality. Now, when such a Data Notification post is published, NEON users who have indicated the topic as an area of interest will receive an email alerting them of the notification. They will also see a webpage alert when they next return to neonscience.org.
This new feature is another great benefit to NEON users who have a free account on our data portal! If you haven’t already registered, sign up today to start receiving important news about the products you use.

A Quick Start Guide (QSG) has been added to the documentation for each data product. The QSGs contain basic information to help users familiarize themselves with the data products, including description of the data contents, data quality information, common calculations or transformations, and, where relevant, algorithm description and/or table joining instructions. For users looking for more details, pointers to more extensive documentation are also provided. Learn more.

Join NEON for a public seminar series where scientists share their research, and new data skills webinars! The goal of these series is to build community among researchers at the intersection of ecology, environmental science, and NEON. In parallel with the seminar series, NEON will be offering a series of data skills training webinars, to guide community members in working with NEON data. Topics will be aligned with the theme of the preceding seminar, but attendance at the preceding seminar is not required. Find the full speaker schedule and how to register for each series here. Missed the first seminar on September 13? View the recording here!

NEON operations and restrictions due to safety impacts (e.g., COVID-19, wildfires, etc.) vary across the Observatory. NEON Leadership is continually assessing conditions across the Observatory. Read current operational status updates.

RESOURCES
Did you know NEON has over 295,000 samples stored at the NEON Biorepository? These samples are available upon request to support research studies and analyses. The GBIF database contains 764k NEON occurrences and 133 citations that have downloaded datasets that include NEON occurrences. Discover and access NEON's archived samples on the NEON Biorepository Data Portal. Explore the portal or take a virtual tour with our new video!

NEON offers a variety of tools and resources for instructors and faculty moving to online teaching. We realize that these are challenging times for our communities around the globe to delivery high quality education in novel online teaching environments. The data and resources from NEON are naturally suited for teaching ecological concepts and skills in both synchronous and asynchronous learning situations. Browse NEON's Learning Hub.

The NEON program generates ecological data on an unprecedented scale. Making sense of that data often requires sophisticated analytical techniques and computer programs. But if you’re not a coder, don’t worry—open source coding resources and community-made custom programs make NEON data more accessible to the ecology community. These resources are compiled in the NEON Code Resources Library.

EVENTS
Learn how to access and navigate NEON data and use the neonUtilities R package! In this 1.5-hour online workshop, NEON scientist Claire Lunch will lead participants through the NEON data portal to learn how to download data; how to use the neonUtilities R package to transform NEON data into a format that is easier to work with; how to use provided metadata to understand data contents; and how to download data directly into R. Register here for upcoming Data Skills Webinars.

Join Elizabeth LaRue for her talk: "Structural diversity as a predictor of ecosystem function across scales and ecoclimatic domains." This will be the 2nd installment of NEON's new monthly Science Seminar series. All talks are 12-1 pm MT. Register here.

Learn how to download and work with NEON LiDAR data using Python! In this 1.5-hour online workshop, NEON scientist Bridget Hass will lead participants through programmatically downloading NEON LiDAR data using functions in Python. Then, participants will use Python packages and functions to explore some of NEON's Discrete LiDAR data products, including the Level-1 classified point cloud (Discrete return LiDAR point cloud), and Level-3 raster data products including the Digital Terrain Model and Digital Surface Model (DTM/DSM, Elevation - LiDAR), and Canopy Height Model (CHM, Ecosystem structure). Register here for upcoming Data Skills Webinars.

Join the 3rd installment of our Science Seminar Series! Theresa Crimmins and Alyssa Rosemartin on will give a talk: "NEON and USA-NPN. Partnering to grow phenology collection, use, and understanding." All talks are 12-1 pm MT. Register here.

OPPORTUNITIES
The LTER Network seeks synthesis proposals that use LTER (and other) data. In the 2022 competition, the LNO expects to award 2-4 synthesis working groups at a funding level of up to $110,000 for up to two years. You can also attend a webinar on August 24, 2022 at 9am Pacific Time to gain more information. Got an idea for combining LTER data with NEON or other long term datasets? Submit your proposal today. Learn more.
NEON-RELATED PAPERS
More and more researchers are using NEON data! Publications that use NEON data and resources are identified and imported into a public Zotero library, where they are tagged to make them easy to query.


View the newest publications here.
Learn how to find papers of interest here.

Knowing how NEON’s data, samples, and infrastructure are used in research is important to measure the program’s success. Please report your publications and related projects here and learn how to cite NEON here. If you know of a publication not included in the list, please notify us.
Follow NEON on social media!