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Welcome to the NEON Science Summit wiki!

Abstract: NEON, or the National Ecological Observatory Network, constitutes 81 field sites across the United States that characterize and quantify how our nation's ecosystems are changing. Ecology finally has its Hadron Collider, and we are using it at the 2019 NEON Science Summit. The Summit, hosted by Earth Lab at CU Boulder, is the very first community-driven ‘unconference’ focused on building new science from the NEON observatory. Over the course of two and a half days, 15-20 break-out working groups will use NEON data to explore questions such as: What are the environmental drivers of microbial community composition across sites? How do we link ground, UAV, airborne, and satellite data across NEON sites to better see trees and identify them to species? Does the relationship between native and exotic species richness change with spatial scale? At the Summit, we will: 1) identify the 3-5 key Grand Challenges that the ecology community wants to address with NEON data in the next 10 years, 2) discuss the critical pieces that are needed to build community engagement and support, and 3) start to connect NEON to the larger data constellation. This Summit has been generously supported by NSF, CIRES, and CU Boulder Grand Challenge.

Objective: The key objective of the Summit is to do cool science with NEON data. The Summit will be conducted based on “the rule of two feet,” everyone should feel that they are contributing or learning in the working groups, and feel comfortable moving on to another group if needed. The activities of each working group will vary, but could include brainstorming, coding, analysis, synthesis, or writing a paper or proposal—representing different stages of idea development. NEON Science Summit attendees will form groups around topics of interest, stay engaged throughout the Summit, and think about how to continue collaborative efforts after the Summit.

Use the links on the right side to navigate to the agenda!