20 June
2005 Memorandum sent by e-mail from Pat Mulholland to database of interested parties of SAPOZEO re. the June 2005 3rd NEON
National Design Consortium meeting in Colorado
To SAPOZEO
members:
I’ve just
returned from the 3rd NEON National Design Consortium meeting in Colorado. NEON is moving forward very fast,
although there is still a great deal
that has not been settled, particularly with regard to deployment locations and how sites will be
chosen. Below are my thoughts on
how things will occur. I think there will likely to be about 10-15 regional NEON observatories, each consisting
of 3-6 sub-observatories divided among
3 general land use categories (wildlands, managed lands including field/pasture, forestry, and agriculture,
and urban/suburban). Each
sub-observatory will likely consist of a 4th order watershed that
is instrumented with climate, soil,
vegetation, aquatic, and biota sensors and
instrumentation. In each observatory there is likely to be one
wildland site with some larger types of
infrastructure such as a canopy crane and soil
biotron for observation and access to belowground systems.
It’s not clear whether all of the
sub-observatories comprising an observatory would need to be located in relatively close proximity.
Each observatory will also have a set
of mobile labs for discrete sampling campaigns in areas without fixed infrastructure. There will also be a
number of facilities (e.g., genomics,
stable isotope, remote sensing) and an extensive educational system
associated either with individual
observatories or the national network of
observatories. There should be a lot of information on these
things appearing on the NEON Inc
website in the coming weeks
(www.NEONINC.org).
There will
be a draft NEON design plan released about
the time of the annual ESA meeting in early August and there will be a
“town hall” meeting at ESA to discuss
it. Its not clear how much detail the plan will contain about number of observatories and sub-observatories
and how they will be selected, but it
should have a lot of detail on the type of measurements and facilities.
As I
understand it, the National Network Design Committee (a group of about 15-20 individuals) together with the management
team (about 10 individuals) will
establish the specific criteria for choosing observatory locations based on an analysis that
separates the US into ecological zones much
the way Bill Hargrove showed at our last SAPOZEO meeting.
NSF will then put out a call for
proposals for NEON observatories in each regional zone and will set up a peer-review process to
evaluate them. However, these
will be highly prescriptive and all the infrastructure and maintenance
and operating personnel are likely to
be NEON Inc employees at all observatories.
Its possible that the ecological zones that are established will not coincide with the regional groups that have
formed to date (including ours) and are
part of COREO. In my opinion, the role of the exiting regional groups is still very much in question at the
moment. Its also not clear when
we will know about the regional observatory zones established by NEON Inc and when NSF will put out the RFP for observatories. I suspect that this
will happen sometime between September
and December of this year.
I don’t
think another meeting of SAPOZEO would
be productive until we hear more about the regional zones established by
NEON Inc and the criteria for regional
observatories. If you are going to ESA,
I encourage you to attend the NEON town meeting (Thursday night I believe). Also, there will be a
relatively short window to comment on the
draft plan after it is released (probably through the NEON Inc website)
and I encourage you to do so. I’m
not sure there will be an opportunity to
comment before then, but you may want to watch the NEON Inc website
for materials and opportunities for
comment.
Bill
Hargrove, Sue Hendricks, and Amy and
Milt Ward are other members of SAPOZEO that also attended the recent NEON Design Consortium meeting last week in
Colorado and they may want to comment
on their feelings about where things are headed, particularly if they differ with those I’ve indicated here.
I’ll try to let you know if I learn
about other significant developments over the next few months.
Pat
Patrick J.
Mulholland
Environmental
Sciences Division
Oak Ridge National Laboratory
P.O. Box
2008
Oak Ridge,
TN 37831-6036
Phone: 865-574-7304
FAX:
865-576-8543
Email: mulhollandpj@ornl.gov