National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON)
NEON Project Office
1444 I St. NW, Suite 200
Washington, DC 20005
Contact: Dan Johnson, 202/628-1500 x215
fax: 202/628-1509; cell: 703/615-7626
www.neoninc.org
April 29, 2008
Science staff from the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) have confirmed all 20 locations of Candidate Core Sites selected for the planned continental-scale ecological research platform.
The sites were chosen because they best represent the ecoclimatic characteristics of their respective domains. Selections were based on quantitative criteria developed by NEON, Inc. and colleagues with the US Forest Service and the US Geological Survey. Sixteen candidate sites are located in the US Lower 48; Alaska hosts two, and Hawaii and Puerto Rico have one site each.
"Each candidate site is designed to act as a detector in a national observatory, sensing a portion of the domain, much as a single detector in a digital camera detects information from a portion of the scene being photographed, while the whole megapixel array creates an image," said NEON CEO David Schimel.
Candidate site locations are now confirmed in three domains where decisions were pending--the Mid-Atlantic, Great Lakes, and Southern Plains. In the Mid-Atlantic, NEON staff selected the Smithsonian Institution Conservation Research Center in Front Royal, Virginia. For the Great Lakes domain, the choice was the University of Notre Dame Environmental Research Center/Trout Lake Biological Station in Boulder Junction, Wisconsin. In the Southern Plains, staff chose the Caddo and LBJ National Grasslands, Texas.
"We conducted a rigorous process to recommend candidate sites for the three remaining domains," said Dr. Michael Keller, NEON Chief of Science. "Our decision making was guided by a single set of requirements." Each candidate site was required to:
Be located in a wildland area representative of the vegetation, soils, landforms, climate, and ecosystems performance of its domain;
provide access to gradient and relocatable sites that respond to regional and continental-scale science questions;
meet the logistical and administrative criteria of year-round access, available permitting, and secure land tenure for 30 years; and
meet the technical criteria of unimpeded air space for regular air survey and potential for an experimental set-aside.
Beyond the required criteria, a second group of desirable considerations focused on logistical, administrative, and technical factors. These included site security, facilities for power and communications, knowledge of local land use history, and appropriate locations for micrometeorological flux and aquatic measurements, among other desirable features.
In 2007, four teams of ecological experts made initial visits to seven NEON Candidate Core Sites; now, detailed site assessments are under way. Thorough site evaluations in all 20 domains will enable NEON staff to refine the scientific, technical, logistical, and financial planning documents needed for upcoming NEON reviews.
The first round of site assessments began in late March with visits to two domains: Southeast, based at the Ordway-Swisher Biological Station in Gainesville, Florida, and Atlantic Neotropical, located at the Guanica Forest, Puerto Rico.
NEON is collaborating with the United States Geological Survey in the evaluation process, using USGS vegetation maps for the entire United States to establish a preliminary design for every candidate site. The maps are being shared with representatives at each location prior to the site visit.
"We have preliminary activities, mapping activities, and the actual visits," said Dr. Keller. "We will test the design during the actual visit, when we probe scientific and logistical matters on the ground. We will look at tower placements, vegetation plots, potential hazards, and limits to accessibility. We will also focus in detail on all of the Fundamental Sentinel Unit (FSU) activities." [The NEON FSU will measure soil and aquatic biogeochemistry in each domain, and track patterns and changes in a variety of organisms, including birds, fish, plants, small mammals, and microbes.]
Another important consideration for project staff and the NEON, Inc. Board of Directors is to make certain that Observatory activities have the least possible impact on the landscape during the estimated 30-year lifespan of the project. The objective is to monitor the environment, not to impact it.
"Good environmental stewardship goes hand in hand with good science," said Dr. Keller. "We want to be observing site characteristics, not site disturbance."
NEON has scheduled the next round of visits to five candidate sites in April and May, 2008. The itinerary includes a variety of US ecoclimatic domains: The Ozarks Complex, anchored in the Talladega National Forest, Alabama; Appalachians/Cumberland Plateau, located in the Walker Branch Watershed, Oak Ridge, Tennessee; Prairie Peninsula, at the Konza Prairie Biological Station, Manhattan, Kansas; Desert Southwest, anchored at the Santa Rita Experimental Range, Arizona; and the Pacific Northwest, at the Wind River Experimental Forest, Washington.
NEON is a continental-scale ecological observation platform for understanding and forecasting the impacts of climate change, land-use change, and invasive species on ecology. The Observatory will support a range of long-term ecological research activities and enhance the capacity of scientists to forecast future states of ecological systems affected by the changing environment.
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Note to Reporters: Contact Dan Johnson at 202/628-1500 x215 (or by cell: 703/615-7626) to arrange a telephone interview with NEON CEO David Schimel. For more about NEON, visit: www.neoninc.org
]]>It has been quite awhile since we have communicated with you. This is largely due to two factors. First, much of the recent work of NEON has involved getting our business systems in place, hiring new staff, writing NSF proposals to keep the funding stream flowing, and getting the new Boulder office up and running. Second, we had to negotiate a new cooperative agreement with NSF, which has required multiple exchanges between NEON and NSF to work out important details. We are pleased to announce that the cooperative agreement is likely to be completed within a week or two. Our cooperative agreement includes items such as reports required, a schedule of deliverables, personnel hires that must be vetted by NSF and so forth.
We thought we would divide the rest of this letter into sections to make it easier for you to track the ongoing developments of NEON Inc.
FUNDING - On December 6 a proposal for about $20 M was submitted to the National Science Board. They voted to authorize the Director of NSF, at his discretion, to award NEON Inc. up to that amount. The award would not include any construction funds. Rather, this award would be to complete the design of NEON and to fund project management. The NSF Director has taken the recommendation of the NSB under advisement and we hope to receive a letter of award in the near future. The Cooperative Agreement, mentioned above, is the award mechanism that will be used to implement the Director’s decision.
The 2009 budget request that NSF has submitted as part of the President’s budget contains a request for $26 M for the NEON Program.
If you look at the NSF budget, you will see that NEON is not in the MREFC portion. No, this does not mean NEON is dead. In fact, it is quite alive. NSF has developed a new sequence of events and tighter standards for large, complex projects such as NEON. Previously, construction funds could be made available after the Preliminary Design Review. Now, construction funds are not available until after the Final Design Review (FDR). Since we are not to the FDR stage yet, those funds were released to other parts of the Foundation’s programs. If we continue on our current path, we will be eligible for MREFC funds after the FDR that likely will occur in 2009.
Clearly, NSF continues to support NEON as we move closer to the project’s construction phase.
PERSONNEL - As you may remember we lost our Project Manager (PM) and more recently our Chief Financial Officer (CFO). Currently we have interim staff in place for both positions. Now we are pleased to announce that on February 8, Tony Beasley, the Project Manager for another NSF MREFC project (ALMA, the Atacama Large Millimeter Array) accepted our offer to join us. This is an absolutely critical hire. Tony has great experience and he will hit the ground running when he arrives in the US from Chile where ALMA is being constructed. We have also added a Procurement Officer and a Director of Human Resources to the DC office, and filled several positions in the Boulder office, including key science staff.
By now we had expected to advertise for the Chief of Education and the Domain Chief Scientists (DCS). These positions have been put on hold for the time being. We hope to advertise for the Chief of Education soon. The DCS searches will likely be delayed for a few months and perhaps up to a year, partly because of finances and partly because we are not yet in a position to use their talents to the fullest extent at this time. In addition, it will take considerable preparation time and effort to conduct a thorough search for the 20 DCS positions.
BOARD OF DIRECTORS - As you know we have had a program of inviting interested institutions to become contributing members of NEON. This group now has over 50 members. These institutions select a representative to communicate with NEON and to attend our annual meeting (we expect the first annual meeting to be scheduled this fall). Also, from this group of representatives a number are elected to be on the Board of Directors of NEON Inc. There are two categories of Board members: the At Large Directors are elected by the entire Board, while the Membership Directors are voted in by their peers, the NEON representatives. Once elected, there are no distinctions between directors in terms of their rights and duties.
This year’s elections added two new At Large Directors to the Board: Margaret Leinen (Chief Science Officer of Climos Corp. and former NSF Assistant Director for the Geosciences Directorate) and David Douglas (VP of Sun Microsystems). The five Member Directors are: Jim Ehleringer (University of Utah), Nancy Grimm (Arizona State University), Margaret Palmer (Chesapeake Biological Laboratory), Debra Peters (USDA ARS Jornada Experimental Range), and David White (Hancock Biological Station)
A consulting firm conducted the election of Member-elected Directors electronically.
CANDIDATE SITES - NEON Chief of Science, Michael Keller, has finished all the preliminary work related to the selection of the candidate sites for both core and relocatable sites within each Domain. In order to develop exact costs for candidate sites, every site must be visited to estimate its infrastructure needs. Michael has set a schedule for these visits. We must now put forward an accurate budget for NEON by late this year and we must assist NSF in conducting an Environmental Assessment of the sites. Without this budget in place, we cannot move forward at a healthy pace to meet stringent requirements for developing a complicated, distributed project like NEON.
As you can see, our lack of communication with you has not been due to lack of hard work by our staff. NEON Inc. is rapidly developing as an organization and we continue to make progress toward our many goals.
We appreciate your forbearance and support, and hope to have much more NEON news to report in the next few months.
Sincerely,
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James A. MacMahon Chairman NEON, Inc. Board |
David Schimel CEO NEON, Inc. |
If you plan to attend the NEON session, please email Rebecca Hufft Kao at bkao@neoninc.org
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