Neon Addressing the Nation's Environmental Challenges (2004) / Chapter Skim
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5. A Synthesis of Early Concepts of the National Ecological Observatory Network and a New Vision
5. A Synthesis of Early Concepts of the National Ecological Observatory Network and a New Vision
Pages 77-86
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From page 77... ...
The National Science Foundation (NSF) sponsored six workshops to outline detailed features of the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON)
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From page 78... ...
That is probably a result of the organization of the workshops, which each brought together one branch of the scientific community to formulate individual viewpoints on the NEON concept. As stated in Chapter 3, the differences and conflicts between ideas described in the workshops make the evaluation of the third question in the committee's charge difficult to answer: 'avoid NEON, as conceptualized in the series of six community workshops, be able to provide infrastructure and logistical support to address the ecological and environmental questions of national concern?
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From page 79... ...
NSF's synthesis of those documents states that "collectively, the network of observatories will allow comprehensive, continental-scale experiments on ecological systems and will represent a virtual laboratory for research to obtain a predictive understanding of the environment." Such observatories, at which coordinated data collection and ecological experiments could be conducted, was universally lauded by the federal agencies and scientific societies represented at the public workshop and Web forum (see Appendix C)
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From page 80... ...
For instance, the overall structure of NEON as a set of spatially distributed sensor arrays and experimental sites emerges from aD the workshop reports. However, we also evaluate potential alternatives for the structure and development of NEON in our assessment of whether NEON could provide the infrastructure and logistical support needed to address environmental challenges.
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From page 81... ...
discussed the possibility of having 16 regional observatories in North America based on a Forest Service designation of 16 blames in the coterminous United States. Establishing observatories based on terrestrial ecoregions fails to acknowledge that freshwater and marine ecoregions are also of national importance.
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From page 82... ...
Budget development focused on the individual observatory and did not address the funding requirements for network-level administrative support and equipment, such as bioinformatics synthesis centers or centers of taxonomic expertise. Individual NEON projects were to be funded through NSF's competitive proposal program, but it was not clear how core data collection and analysis would be funded.
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From page 83... ...
. Its bioinformatics center could either partner with or be modeled after existing bioinformatics centers such as the National Institutes of Health's National Center for Biotechnology Information which manages GenBank, the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis, or the National Biological Information Infrastructure.
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From page 84... ...
NEON observatories were to communicate information to the scientific community, to local, regional and national decision-makers, to the general public, and to the fuD range of students, from kindergarten to graduate students. The committee agreed with those goals but found few details on how education and outreach goals would be achieved and who might be responsible for carrying out the plans.
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From page 85... ...
The workshops provided crucial documentation and careful consideration of essential building blocks from which a focused vision could emerge. The documents included fundamental insights into how and why a NEON network should function.
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