Aquatic science and experiment in the U.S. National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON): A new large user facility

The National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) is a national-scale research platform for assessing the impacts of climate change, land-use change, and invasive species on ecosystem structure and function.  NEON partitions the United States into 20 ecoclimate domains.  Each domain hosts one fully instrumented permanent aquatic site in a wildland area and one semi-permanent location, which aims to capture ecologically significant gradients (40 sites total).  Each site includes instrumentation, linked by advanced cyberinfrastructure to record and archive ecological data for at least 30 years.  At each site, NEON will support a large suite of aquatic and terrestrial sensor arrays and measurements to providing data on biogeochemistry, surface and groundwater discharge, stream and lake morphology, and air quality.  The observatory will track patterns in aquatic plants, algae, invertebrates, and fish or other top predators.  Data will be gathered from the level of gene to ecosystem at a local to continental scale.  Experiments which accelerate predicted environmental change are one of the key areas of importance to NEON.  The STReam Experimental Observatory Network (STREON) is a long-term, large-scale field experiment that will quantify how nutrient enrichment and reduced consumer diversity influence the resistance and resilience of stream ecosystems.