

Researchers can also request physical samples from the NEON Biorepository or set up additional custom data collection through the NEON Assignable Assets program. NEON brings data, with consistency and comparability, with hundreds of data products spanning organismal sampling and observations, soil and water chemistry and temperature, meteorological data, and remote sensing data from the Airborne Observation Platform. LTER has a 40-year history and a diverse range of ecology data, including both pure observational data and data from active experiments run by different site scientists.
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As a long-term, 30-year Observatory, it produces open-source data that is free for scientists, educators, and the public to use in a variety of ways.īoth networks provide rich and valuable data for the ecology community the two models for long-term research complement and support each other. Through its Assignable Assets program, the NEON program supports outside researchers, but it does not run active research experiments. All of the sites are centrally managed to ensure data quality and comparability between sites and across time. Data collection is harmonized across all sites, so the same sets of data will be collected using the same collection protocols at each terrestrial or aquatic site for the entire 30-year life of the program (with a few site-specific exceptions). NEON supports 81 freshwater and terrestrial field sites organized in 20 ecoclimate Domains across the contiguous U.S., Alaska, Puerto Rico, and Hawaii. NEON scientists and staff operate the Observatory and collect data for open use by a wide range of researchers. NEON is an Observatory, not a research network. NEON is also funded by the NSF, but is a very different model from LTER.


Data from all projects are publicly available through the Environmental Data Initiative (EDI), a data repository for the environmental data community. Some sites also conduct large-scale, team-led experiments spanning the 40-year life of the program as well as shorter-term research projects led by researchers or grad students. Cross-site synthesis is promoted by collection of data in several core areas common to all sites in the LTER network. LTER is a research network, primarily driven by "bottom-up" research by site scientists, with sites supporting a wide range of long-term data collection that address contemporary ecological questions. Their sites include terrestrial, aquatic, urban, and marine locations. Over the decades, some sites have been closed and others opened, depending on the needs of the research community. Since then, the network has grown and evolved, currently supporting 28 sites in the U.S., South Pacific, and Antarctica. The first LTER sites were founded in 1980 with funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF). NEON and LTER have a lot in common-and some important differences. Sharing Data, Space and Resources Across Research Networks These shared spaces add value for both networks and for the research community at large. In fact, a number of NEON sites were deliberately colocated with established LTER sites across the country. The NSF-funded National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) and the Long-Term Ecological Research Network ( LTER) have worked closely together since the initial design phase of the Observatory.
