NEON Workshop Working Group C

1
NEON Workshop Working Group C

• Jane Brockmann
• Maria Gonzalez
• Sam McNaughton
• John Porter
• Gary Wellborn
• David Wise
• Robert Zink

2
Task Plan for Observatory

• Key question What can an observatory let us do
  that we cant do already?
• Will allow investigators or group of
  investigators to study one site
• Cutting edge technologies and multiple tools
• Address cross disciplinary questions in
  integrated fashion
• Apply a diversity of information to those
  questions

3
Investigated Possible Themes

• Decline of native species and replacement by
  alien species
• Ecological Change
• Food web structure and function
• Ecotones
• Questions from BON workshops
• Evolution of behavioral and physiological
  adaptations()mating systems etc.)

4
Things an Observatory should have (institutional
sense)

• Field Station(s)
• place to stay and work
• Site(s) - place to study
• Close link to collection base
• Outreach/Inreach
• Different disciplines
• public education
• education - grad undergrad

5
What do we want to do there?

• Broad scale monitoring of animal movements
• telemetry, real time video
• Monitor biodiversity
• Determine history of site
• Determine trophic relationships
• microbes to higher organisms
• Abiotic factors (fluxes etc.)

6
What do we need?

• Ability to link temporal and geographical data
• Ability to replicate sites
• Ability to track changes and reconstruct history
• Ability to compare data from different communities

7
Key Technologies

• Micro-radio tracking
• DNA sequencing
• Mass spectrometer
• Environmental monitoring stations
• Flux Tower
• Informatics/Databases
• Wireless Networking
• Automated tools for field data collection

8
Challenges

• What kinds of things will be of interest to the
  general public?
• Keeping an integrated focus
• Operating budgets need to be large - labor
  intensive activities
• Build culture of collaboration
• Fostering broad perspective in research community

9
Challenges

• Standards Issues
• Collecting
• Archiving
• Record Keeping
• Maintaining needed flexibility to respond to new
  problems and ideas