By John Borghi and Daniella Lowenberg Yesterday we talked about about why researchers may have to make their data open, today let’s start talking about…
Category: science
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 …
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 …
White House Climate Data Initiative Addresses Climate Change Through Open Data
On March 19, 2014, the White House launched the Climate Data Initiative (CDI), part of President Obama’s Climate Action Plan launched in June 2013. The Climate Action Plan is the Administration’s blueprint for domestic and international efforts to prepare for the impacts of climate change and reduce carbon emissions. The CDI is meant to spur …
Responding to a Call to Action: Preserving Blogs and Discussion Forums in Science, Medicine, Mathematics and Technology
The following is a guest post by Christie Moffatt, Manager, Digital Manuscripts Program, History of Medicine Division, National Library of Medicine Developing case studies around digital content subject areas has been a major focus of the NDSA Content Working Group, and the activity has enabled members to share the concerns and challenges specific to their communities. […]
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 …
At the AGU meeting, inspiration and camaraderie
At about 8:30 am on the morning of December 4th, in the hallway by the elevator on the ninth floor of a hotel in downtown San Francisco, I met a nicely dressed and impatient woman. “I’ve let two elevator cars go by,” she said, frustrated. “They were packed full of people wearing name tags around …
Creating a digital menagerie
NEON technicians will collect and identify countless insect specimens over the lifetime of the observatory. To put it into perspective, during a short prototype collection at one site over three weeks using 20 traps, we collected close to 400 ground beetles. Now imagine 40 traps collecting insects at 60 sites for several months every year …