December 2019
A Message from Gene Kelly
We hope to see you at the AGU Fall Meeting next week! The NEON program will have a kiosk in booth #206 where you can receive a data portal demo, and I’m excited to report that there will be over 60 NEON-related activities taking place throughout the event. If you’re attending the meeting, be sure to: 

  • Pick up a badge ribbon at booth #206, if you’re a member of a NEON STEAC or TWG, or if you've used or are using NEON data.

  • Check out the two NEON Town Hall presentations:


  • Take a look at all NEON-related activities, including oral and poster presentations, here. What will you attend? 

Be sure to stop a NEON staff member to tell us how you’re using NEON data—or tweet us at @NEON_sci ! 

The NEON program, and everyone affiliated with it, exists to deliver the best data products, in the most efficient way, to the community. I encourage everyone to work together to focus on sharing ideas and improving processes so that NEON can continue driving the vital research we need to better understand our environment.

As always, we’re grateful for your support of the NEON program and welcome your feedback.

All the best, 
Gene Kelly, Acting Chief Scientist of the NEON program
USING NEON DATA
Adlafia neoniana (Naviculaceae) may be tiny, but it's got a big name to live up to. It's the first new species to be discovered on a NEON field site and named after the NEON program. The discovery was made at the Rio Cupeyes (CUPE) and Rio Guilarte (GUIL) field sites in Puerto Rico by a team led by Marco Cantonati, Don Charles and Ionel Ciugulea of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University and the MUSE - Museo delle Scienze (MC). Their work was published in July 2019 in Plant Ecology and Evolution .

The exact composition of each local community is influenced by variables that include evolutionary history, current climate and interspecies competition or codependence. A new study led by Will Pearse of Utah State University is using NEON data to quantify the roles of these different variables in the assembly of ecological communities.

Michael Kramer, a small mammal researcher and the Assistant Director of the University of Notre Dame Environmental Research Center (UNDERC) , has spent much of his career studying the ecology and behavior of mice and other small mammals. His latest research leverages NEON data to document how mouse populations are changing over time—and how these small fries may be changing the ecosystems around them.

How are ecosystems across the continent changing over time? What are the relationships between climate, ecosystem composition and soil organic matter? And how are soil composition and carbon storage potential likely to change in the future? Adrian Gallo, a Graduate Research Assistant in the Oregon State University Department of Crops and Soil Sciences, is investigating soil organic matter as part of a study funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) -- "A continental-scale assessment of the linkages between soil organic matter stabilization mechanisms, controls, and vulnerability."

CONTACT US
Have you used NEON data, samples or infrastructure? Please contact us about your research and we'd be happy to write a blog article featuring your work as well as add your papers to our publications list.
EVENTS & OPPORTUNITIES
This is a unique networking and professional development opportunity for faculty interested in implementing or adapting existing NEON teaching materials to their educational settings. Faculty already using NEON data in their teaching who would like to use this opportunity to improve and transition to it to an open educational resource are also invited to participate. Applications are due by December 15, 2019 .

There is an open call for applications to provide a two-day Explore NEON workshop at host institutions. This workshop would introduce researchers to NEON, teach them how to access and work with NEON data, and allow them to interact with NEON science staff. Applications are due December 16, 2019 .

Full Proposals due January 16, 2020. Learn more here .

The program is intended for early career scientists interested in going to ESA 2020 and using (or learning more about using) NEON for their research. Interested applicants need to apply by January 30, 2020 .

Each year, NEON hires hundreds of temporary field technicians to assist our full-time field operations staff with observational sampling. Learn more.

Did you know you can put NEON research equipment and field staff to work for you? NEON's mobile deployment platform, aerial observation platform, automated sensor infrastructure and observational sampling infrastructure can be used to gather data for your research. Get started!

COLLABORATION
Battelle and the NEON program teamed up with QUBES and 11 other partners for a three-day conference in Boulder, Colorado in April 2019. Bringing Conversations on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in Data Science to the Environmental Sciences brought together stakeholders from academia, government, non-profits and business to discuss strategies for increasing minority representation in data science and environmental science fields. It resulted in the development of EDSIN (the Environmental Data Science Inclusion Network), a QUBES community dedicated to supporting inclusion and diversity in the data sciences.

RECENT NEON-RELATED PAPERS
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 .

Gough, C. M., Atkins, J. W., Fahey, R. T., & Hardiman, B. S. (2019). High rates of primary production in structurally complex forests. Ecology .

Ayres, E. (2019). Quantitative Guidelines for Establishing and Operating Soil Archives. Soil Science Society of America Journal , 83(4), 973-981.

Klarenberg, G., & Wisely, S. M. (2019). Evaluation of NEON Data to Model Spatio-Temporal Tick Dynamics in Florida. Insects , 10(10), 321.

Weinstein, B. G., Marconi, S., Bohlman, S. A., Zare, A., & White, E. P. (2019). Geographic Generalization in Airborne RGB Deep Learning Tree Detection . bioRxiv , 790071. 

Elmendorf, S. C., Crimmins, T. M., Gerst, K. L., & Weltzin, J. F. (2019). Time to branch out? Application of hierarchical survival models in plant phenology . Agricultural and Forest Meteorology , 279, 107694.

Schooler, S. L., & Zald, H. S. (2019). Lidar Prediction of Small Mammal Diversity in Wisconsin, USA . Remote Sensing , 11(19), 2222.

Lado, P., Cox, C., Wideman, K., Hernandez, A., & Klompen, H. (2019). Population Genetics of Dermacentor variabilis Say 1821 (Ixodida: Ixodidae) in the United States Inferred From ddRAD-seq SNP Markers . Annals of the Entomological Society of America .

Xu, K., Pingintha-Durden, N., Luo, H., Durden, D., Sturtevant, C., Desai, A. R., ... & Metzger, S. (2019). The eddy-covariance storage term in air: Consistent community resources improve flux measurement reliability . Agricultural and Forest Meteorology , 279, 107734.

Badawi, M., Helder, D., Leigh, L., & Jing, X. (2019). Methods for Earth-Observing Satellite Surface Reflectance Validation . Remote Sensing , 11(13), 1543.

Başeski, E. (2019, June). A New Remote Sensing Dataset for Heliport Detection. In 2019 9th International Conference on Recent Advances in Space Technologies (RAST) (pp. 419-422). IEEE.