Memo to SAPOZEO (4 March 2005)

Jake and I wanted to give you an update about NEON activities. As many of you know, there are two concurrent efforts now underway – (1) the establishment of a consortium of regional NEON groups and (2) a series of workshops being sponsored by the National NEON Design Consortium to establish the science drivers and preliminary design criteria for NEON.

In the first effort, the various regional groups have formed a consortium of regional groups called COREO (Cornsortium of Regional Ecological Observatories). A COREO web site is now available at www.coreoneon.org and contains a NEON Resources survey. We want to encourage each of you to go on the website and provide the information requested for your field station or long-term research site. The survey has been created by the NEON National Design Consortium's Facilitities and Infrastructure Subcommittee to collect information about US research sites, collections, and analytical labs that could be useful for Network design. It's brief, designed to take <15 minutes to complete. The information collected will be made available to the national NEON design consortium as a map-enabled database. Please try to register your site as soon as possible (preferably before March 14 when the next national NEON design consortium meeting will be held).

To date COREO has held one meeting of representatives and both Jake and I represented our region (SAPOZEO – Southern Appalachians to Ozarks Ecological Observatory). Another meeting of CREO is scheduled for late April.

The second effort (National NEON Design Consortium workshops) is well underway and you can comment on the science question developed by the various subcommittees by going to the NEON website (www.neoninc.org). You will have an opportunity to comment on the products of the second workshop to be held the week of March 14 once these are placed on the website (about 2 weeks after the workshop). I am co-chair of the Hydroecology subcommittee.

Finally, we have tentatively planned another SAPOZEO meeting for May 13 in Knoxville at the University of Tennessee Conference Center. The purpose of the meeting will be to report on COREO and the National NEON Design Consortium activities and to continue our discussions of NEON-related science issues for our region. We have a very small travel budget for this meeting and will try to cover some of the travel costs of some of you. The meeting will begin about 9 am and run until about 5 pm. We will send out more details later. We are also in the process of developing a SAPOZEO website.

Please forward this email to anyone that you feel might be interested with a note to send me email addresses so I can add them to my SAPOZEO distribution list.

Thanks,

Pat Mulholland and Jake Weltzin