National Ecological Observatory Network

The National Science Foundation’s National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) is a continental-scale observation facility operated by Battelle and designed to collect long-term open access ecological data to better understand how U.S. ecosystems are changing. The comprehensive data, spatial extent and remote sensing technology provided by NEON will enable a large and diverse user community to tackle new questions at scales not accessible to previous generations of ecologists.

NEON collects environmental data and archival samples that characterize plant, animals, soil, nutrients, freshwater and atmosphere from 81 field sites strategically located in terrestrial and freshwater ecosystems across the U.S.

• Collection methods are standardized across field sites to provide high quality datasets from in situ automated instrument measurements, observational sampling and airborne remote sensing surveys.
• Over 175 open access data products are available on the NEON data portal
• NEON also provides a variety of open access data tutorials, code packages and other resources to enable use of NEON data.
• NEON also archives over 100,000 biological, genomic and geological samples each year which are available upon request from the NEON Biorepository.