The University of Arizona

 

UA, Five Other SW Universities Linked into Massive Ecological Research Network

By Jeff Harrison
July 31, 2007

The National Ecological Observatory Network, or NEON, has announced its selection of 20 core sites that will form a national observatory that, when completed, will measure ecological change on an unprecedented continental scale.

NEON, which is funded by the National Science Foundation, will link a network of stationary and mobile instrument sites, including a permanent site based in southern Arizona, that will monitor changes in climate, land-use patterns and other ecological features in the U.S. The southwestern domain of NEON will be anchored at the historic Santa Rita Experimental Range south of Tucson, which is administered by The University of Arizona.

NEON activities in the region also will extend to related sites operated by other major research institutions, including Arizona State University (ASU), the University of California at Riverside (UCR), New Mexico State University (NMSU), the University of New Mexico (UNM) and the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP).

The Santa Rita Experimental Range was the first in a series of research stations strung throughout the Rocky Mountains. It was established during the Theodore Roosevelt administration in 1902 and folded into the U.S. Forest Service in 1915, and has been a mecca for scientists studying the desert Southwest.

Scientists say data collected from NEON will be essential if society is to manage ecological change in both the short- and long-term future. Nowhere is this more important than in the Southwest where the only thing heating up faster than the weather is the torrid growth of the region's urban areas. Regional and national shifts in the environment occur on such an enormous scale that scientists need a tool that allows them to take the collective pulse of the changing landscape.

"Major instrumentation for scientific observation is a key pathway for achieving scientific breakthroughs for complex scientific questions," said William Harris, a former National Science Foundation chemist and currently president of Science Foundation Arizona.

"NEON is critical to understanding issues related to water and other resource needs of future decades. This investment should provide high returns in a more robust capacity to forecast the impacts of climate change on our nation's ecosystems," Harris said.

Nationwide, the 20 NEON core sites will create a single observatory that will integrate an unprecedented number of coordinated measurements, from tiny microsensors in the soil to data from airborne observations, according to David Breshears, a professor in the UA School of Natural Resources.

"These core sites were chosen to represent the rich diversity of ecological landscapes in the United States," Breshears said. "Given that climate varies from year to year and place to place, ecologists will need to take a long hard look to be able to untangle what is going on. NEON is slated to provide the equivalent of annual checkups for all of our ecosystems for the next 30 years."

Like other NEON sites, the Santa Rita Experimental Range will have an array of scientific tools. Instruments on towers will track seasonal and long-term climate patterns and meteorological changes. Automated sensors will collect soil, microclimate and aquatic data. Aircraft carrying spectroscopic sensors will monitor dynamics such as changes in land-use patterns and how well landscapes recover from disturbances. Finally, staff on the ground will support biodiversity surveys, observations of plant and animal populations and behavior, and collect data on biogeochemical processes.

In addition, researchers will be able to deploy mobile equipment mounted either directly into vehicles or towed to study the impact of unique events as they happen. Such events could be as varied as wildfires, natural catastrophes, disease outbreaks or the emergence of invasive species.

Movable instruments, like those at Santa Rita, are designed to be relocated as scientists examine land-use change and climate effects on Southwestern ecosystems.

"Urbanization gradients - such as the one extending from Santa Rita to Phoenix, where the ASU Central Arizona-Phoenix Long-Term Ecological Research (CAP LTER) project anchors the urban end of the gradient - will reveal how land-use change associated with urbanization changes ecosystems," said Nancy Grimm, a professor in the Arizona State University School of Life Sciences, and the principal investigator and co-director of CAP LTER.

"Other NEON ground-based measurements, coupled with data from existing satellites, will follow gradients of rainfall seasonality and other climate variables within the Southwest. Observations will pan east to west from the Jornada Experimental Range LTER site run by the USDA Agricultural Research Service and NMSU in the Chihuahuan Desert in southern New Mexico, to the UCR Sweeney Granite Mountains Natural Reserve Site in the Mojave Desert, and north to the UNM Sevilleta LTER site in central New Mexico," Grimm said.

Breshears says that NEON is to environmental scientists what the best new telescopes are to astronomers.

"To answer the nation's emerging questions regarding climate change, we need a radically new kind of research strategy," Breshears said. "In the same way that telescopes allow scientists to observe distant objects, the NEON instrument will allow ecologists to step back and see how the whole country is changing. What an exciting opportunity to address what is arguably among our society's greatest challenges!"

Media contacts:

David Breshears, professor, UA School of Natural Resources, 520-621-7259, daveb@email.arizona.edu;

Travis E. Huxman, assocate professor, UA Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, and director of B2 Earthscience, 520-307-0699, huxman@email.arizona.edu;

Nancy Grimm, ASU School of Life Sciences, principal investigator and co-cirector, CAP LTER, 480-965-4735, nbgrimm@asu.edu.

Debra Peters, USDA ARS, principal investigator, Jornada Basin LTER, 505-646-2777, debpeter@nmsu.edu.

More information about the National Ecological Observatory Network is available online at http://neoninc.org/.

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