It has been over two years since I was last in the woods of New Hampshire collecting invasive plant data for my undergraduate research. From then to now, I have thought little about data sets or statistical variability. Instead, I have focused on getting thirteen-year-old kids to simply grasp the concept that Earth has seasons …
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Boots on the ground for NEON Member Institution Representatives
NEON Member Institution representatives learned about NEON data collection first-hand this week during a visit the Central Plains Experimental Range (CPER), the Domain 10 core site. This site tour was part of the 2014 NEON Membership Meeting, held October 21-22 in Boulder, CO at NEON Headquarters. A group of 20 participants toured the CPER site …
Interns Summer in Review, Part 4: So, what do YOU do?
An Explanation of NEON’s Airborne Observation Platform and Cyber Infrastructure through New Eyes After spending time together in NEON’s summer internship program, Ariel Kaluzhny (a computer science student) and Maddy Ball (an environmental science major) learned a lot about their NEON projects, explored a good bit of Colorado and became great friends. But, coming from …
Interns Summer in Review, Part 3: What’s an Imaging Science student doing at NEON?
NEON is quite the unexpected place for an Imaging Science student to do an internship. NEON is all about Ecology, so where am I supposed to fit in here? My internship is in FIU, which is the Fundamental Instrumentation Unit. FIU is a science department whose purpose is to facilitate the instrument-based collection of abiotic …
NEON presents its first higher education video
NEON is excited to present its first video in a series of multimedia resources. The Story of LiDAR Data provides a general overview of LiDAR data and highlights how LiDAR data is used to measure structural characteristics of trees. Education is an important part of the NEON project design. NEON’s higher education program provides a …
Spring Training in Florida
I recently returned from a week of training in Florida. No, not for baseball, but for Big Data. More specifically, how to collect samples for NEON’s Terrestrial Observation System. You know…insects, plants, soils, microbes, mammals, and pathogens. With a push of a button, you’ll be able to access data about all of these things: their …
Dear future NEON data users: Thanks for your input!
While we’ve released some preliminary data from newly constructed field sites, our data portal is a work in progress. We want to know what you, future users of NEON data, are looking for when you search for and download data. We’ve hired a usability firm here in Boulder near headquarters to help us systematically collect your feedback so we can use …
From field notebooks to rack servers
Let me begin by saying I’m a believer in big data in ecology, and there’s no more exciting place to be working right now on these problems than here at NEON. But after just a few short weeks here, I’ve discovered there’s a huge difference between holding a sign that says “BIG DATA NOW!” and …