It has been a long, productive year for the NEON team. 

2009 was the year when the diverse ideas and plans for a national ecological observatory generated by the scientific community since the late 90’s were assembled into a detailed project definition, which was then documented and reviewed – not an easy task. Between December 2008 and November 2009 we produced several thousand pages of project designs and estimates, and conducted more than a dozen reviews of different parts of the Observatory, ending in a successful NSF-led Final Design Review in November. In early February, we heard that the NSF has included us in their construction budget proposal to Congress for 2011 – exciting news, and the result the team deserved.

There are still several hurdles to clear before the Observatory becomes a reality, but all signs are good.

The central unifying theme of NEON design is ecological data products. These data products take on many forms – images from the airborne platform; population counts from human observers; automated readings from towers and sensors in our domain infrastructure; DNA analyses from commercial labs. Developing scientific methods to enable detection of long-term changes and trends in these data – i.e. observing both the drivers of and responses to climate change, land-use change, unsustainable water use and invasive species – is a core NEON goal. Combining these data to generate useful scientific information, increased understanding and support informed decision making is the key role of the Observatory in the future.

Our assembled team covers many fields of expertise. There are new challenges for all of us, and working together to develop the Observatory is exciting. My colleagues in ecology and biology are very familiar with the issues associated with field data acquisition; my background in astronomy involves larger data rates and more technical observatory operations; many of our engineering staff have manufacturing backgrounds. Many of our professional staff come from commercial backgrounds, and working for an organization where scientific issues can sometimes greatly impact major decisions is new.   For all of us, the fascinating complexity and volume of the data generated by a large-scale ecological observatory is new.

Reversing the natural tendency for all these diverse groups to fly apart is a big part of my job, and some days it keeps me busy. Some days I know all the answers; some days I don’t, but every day I feel the challenges and rewards of managing a project which will take ecology into a new era.  A new culture is arising.   

NEON sits in the middle of a web of federal and private partnerships. We greatly appreciate those organizations and institutions that are hosting our facilities and supporting our analyses. We are also very aware that our Observatory will be only one element among many different projects and facilities attacking these problems of national and global importance, and we look forward to working with all of them on the solutions. 

NEON will be one of the first MREFC projects to involve education planning/development from the very beginning, and we’re proud of that. We live in a time when difficult questions are being asked, and in all scenarios solutions will involve informed discussion and evaluation by citizens, so being able to use NEON information in real world decisions is a key goal we must achieve. NEON’s education team is already underway with prototype efforts to make this important goal a reality.

During 2010 we are going to launch several field and computing prototyping initiatives to minimize risk and prepare for construction. Assuming the project is approved, Observatory construction may begin in 2011, and is planned to last for five years. Though the long haul in 2009 was tiring, the team remains strong and enthused, and we’re looking forward to the task ahead.

As we move forward we will always need the advice and support of the community and the public, so we look forward to hearing from you.

The New Year is here and NEON staff continue to make substantial progress in the design of the NEON Observatory.   Part of that progress involves filling the empty desks waiting to be occupied by experts ready to move NEON to the next level.   

NEON has an incredibly dedicated and talented team, and we continue to expand our staff with an average growth rate of about three hires per month.  Given the kind of economy we’re currently facing, that’s a pretty big deal. 

The economic climate means there’s more people out there looking for jobs, which means there’s a bigger pool of potential employees to choose from.  However, successfully hiring qualified and motivated staff is not so simple.   NEON is headquartered in an area teeming with technical expertise and has a built-in eco-conscious community to boot, so we’ve got some serious competition.  Further, according to recent studies, today’s job seeker has a wish list that includes meaningful work, competitive salary and benefits, stability, and opportunity for growth.   What NEON has to offer to them is equally as important as what they have to offer us.

Our responsibility as NEON’s HR department is somewhat unique compared to a lot of traditional HR departments.  When I first joined NEON in October 2007, our CEO, David Schimel, told me that a large part of NEON’s success would hinge upon the ability of Human Resources (HR) to staff the organization appropriately.  “Appropriately” meant that in addition to bringing in the best experts we could, we had to do it in a short time frame and on a national scale.  And here we are, doing just that.  Are you interested in joining us?

As we prepare to “break ground” for the construction phase of this project, how does NEON rank when it comes to meeting candidate requirements?

Meaningful Work – Check.  We’ve got plenty of meaningful work and selling our mission is easy.      

Competitive Salary and Benefits – Check and Check.  NEON’s compensation philosophy is to use a market-based approach.  We continually survey the relevant labor markets in which we compete and our salary mid-points are targeted at the 75^th percentile.  Some noteworthy features of our benefits package include generous paid leave and 100% employer paid medical. 

Stability and Work Experience – Check and Check.  Employees at NEON tend to have an entrepreneurial spirit.  This means they needed more than a healthy dose of professional courage to leave a current employer and blaze an ecological trail to do what’s never been done before within the ecological community.  They needed to challenge all of their assumptions, trust in and rely on one another by working collaboratively and present meaningful cost-effective methods and solutions that preserve the integrity of NEON’s mission. Sounds daunting, doesn’t it?  It is, especially if you were recruited to NEON before the recent design reviews with no guarantee of continued funding. 

Yet, our employees have performed time and again and I fully expect the level of their individual and collective contributions to continue.  Why?  In large part because in exchange for their entrepreneurial spirit and significant contributions, the HR department has created (and continues to refine) a work experience that is “ground-breaking.”   For instance, as a Staff Scientist your day may start by bundling up your infant to bring them to work.  Yes, that’s right!  NEON staff can bring their infants up to six months of age into work.  Also, getting to work is easy using your NEON-subsidized EcoPass.  While at work you’ll interface with other scientists, educators, engineers and office support staff to review the talk you’re giving to the community, assist with developing data products, finish a poster for a scientific conference, and/or review protocols for data collection at our Domains.  At the end of the day, you return home knowing your efforts and ideas were valued and welcomed. 

So, successful recruitment at NEON takes a lot of effort, and it’s not easy.  It’s taken quite a bit of time and energy to build a sustainable process-driven approach with a steadfast commitment to execute our process each and every time, for each hire, at every level and for every position.    However, the payoff is incredible and has yielded tangible results.  The caliber of the NEON is staff is evident everywhere you look.  The quality of work can be seen in the results of multiple NSF-led reviews, in conferences and meetings, at employee events, in one-on-one discussions, and even in the way staff have embraced new benefits such as sharing office space with infants.   

I’m proud of what our employees have accomplished, and I’m honored to work side by side with them.  I look forward to our next phase with them and possibly you.  If you’re interested in being a part of this engaged and enthusiastic bunch, working at either our headquarters in Boulder or in one of our Domains, please look for openings that match your background, experience and interests and send your CV/resume to careers@neoninc.org.

What?! Not Old Faithful! The impacts of climate change, land use change and invasive species are already evident and significant within the Greater Yellowstone Area (GYA). Understanding how these drivers influence wildlands and their consequences for ecosystem management in the GYA are important challenges for scientists and managers. Yellowstone is considered one of the crown jewels of US wildland ecosystems, and managing for change there is critical to Yellowstone’s future and likely to be an inspiration and a model to resource managers elsewhere.

In early November, a range of experts, including agency and NGO scientists, state and local officials, and federal managers met at Yellowstone to discuss the formulation of science agendas for land management agencies in the Greater Yellowstone Area GYA. The science agendas are intended to identify critical information gaps, steer the research community toward the most important science needs of managers, and guide future funding and permitting decisions by the agencies.

Dave Schimel gave the opening plenary talk for the event, and provided a summary and wrap-up at the close of the workshop.

The workshops revealed a couple of interesting points. First, some changes are inevitable and cannot be averted with known management techniques. For example, if temperatures exceed the range for certain species, those species cannot be maintained within the GYA. Second, the history of management in the GYA is filled with cautionary tales where the cascade of consequences from well-intended management intervention led to surprising or undesirable consequences. As one of the US’s largest and most intact wildlands, there is value to surveillance and documenting change, as opposed to resisting changes. At the same time, it was agreed that certain changes needed to be managed with all available tools, especially when success seemed likely.

Participants identified three overarching areas for consolidation of knowledge and new research:
1. Observation and documentation of drivers of change: climate, land use and invasives
2. Measurement of species and process-level sensitivity to change, especially for keystone and threatened species.
3. Research on indirect effects, cascading effects and complex feedbacks, leading to better system-level forecasting.

Further documentation from the workshop can be found HERE.

NEON is one of several organizations that will be carefully watching changes in Yellowstone over the next decades. In addition to having a candidate core site planned for the Park, NEON has planned candidate relocatable sites in the Northern Rockies that will collect data focusing on exurban development and invasive species in the GYA. Understanding climate impacts in Yellowstone and the potential for adaptation to climate impacts, as well as other drivers of change in the park, is a unique opportunity for educating scientists, managers and the public.

“We do not know what we do not know:”  this is the un-escapable reality that we’re all confronted with, and something that, by the nature of epistemology, we will continue to be confronted with. 

In the dialog around climate change, John Holdren, Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, compared our current situation to being “in a car with bad brakes driving toward a cliff in the fog.”  We know that there is a cliff, and some sense of potential indicators along the way that we may want to look out for (like a sign saying “sharp turn ahead”) that are the tipping points where there is a rapid transition into another state space.  Knowing potential indicators that we may encounter as we trundle toward the cliff allows us to design strategies to look for those indicators and design remediation strategies to change our trajectory. 

In this allegorical depiction, the NEON infrastructure is the “stuff” that we can hang off this car to help illuminate what is in the fog ahead of us.  Or, maybe NEON is the exploratory vehicle that allows us (the community) to be the advanced scouts for the rest of the folks in the speeding vehicle right behind us (hopefully, we’ll never need to be the first ones who experience air beneath our feet!).  Maybe this should be the role that we cast ourselves into; as the lead vehicle for understanding what’s ahead in the fog of complex, natural systems.

As you very well know, such systems are “messy” because of the intricate tapestry weaved by the complex interactions between processes and physical entities.  The ecological and earth systems sciences community has the challenging responsibility of studying and communicating the characteristics of this fabric so that we better understand the resiliency of natural ecosystems to perturbations.  Often forgotten in the dialog around large-scale environmental challenges are the roles of the biosphere and land-use change, and the interactions between the forcings and responses of the abiotic and biotic components of “natural” and “managed” ecosystems.  The NEON “forcing-response-interaction” framework has been touted as a powerful, elegant way of encapsulating and communicating the complexity of the coupled human-natural systems that we are embedded in.  Former NSF Assistant Director for Biological Sciences Dr. James Collins has been a strong proponent for promoting activities that enable the next generation of scientists to synthesize complex systems at different scales.  In doing so, we, the community in the lead vehicle driving into the fog, would be better be able to serve the nation through scientific leadership at relevant junctures when national policy needs a direction to steer toward. 

The interaction between science and policy, of course, is a whole different conversation.

Like the vessels of old such as the Mayflower that brought the first colonists to these shores and the vessels of this age like the Saturn 5 rocket that propelled humankind to the moon, we are going to breach new frontiers on this journey, discovering things that we do not now know that we do not know.  You and the galley crew at NEON, Inc. (who have been rowing fast and furious enough over the past few years to pull a water-skier around the world on a lazy Sunday afternoon behind a rather large capital ship) are on this discovery journey together.  In Star Trek VI’s “Peace: The Undiscovered Country,” peace between the Federation and the Klingon Empire was the destination of that voyage led by the crew of the Enterprise.  Where this ship is heading, though, is a place where we’ll find more stuff to puzzle future generations of Spaceship Earth’s scientists.

In this presentation before the NEON, Inc. membership two weeks ago, Dr. James P. Collins presented a compelling vision for how NEON fits into US plans to address environmental challenges in the coming decades.

The following five clips provide the presentation in entirety; viewers can choose to view the talk with PowerPoint or without.

Segment 1: The changing science and technology environment

Segment 2: Changing ways of doing science

Segment 3: Managing the science

Segment 4: Large-scale infrastructure for the biological sciences

Segment 5: Synthesis