The National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) – funded fully by the U.S. National Science Foundation and managed by Battelle Memorial Institute – is a non-profit, continental-scale observatory for discovering and understanding the impacts of climate change, land-use change, and invasive species on ecology. NEON will gather long-term data on ecological responses of the biosphere to changes in land use and climate, and of feedback with the geosphere, hydrosphere and atmosphere. The NEON Program is the first initiative in the biological sciences to be supported through the National Science Foundation’s Major Research Equipment and Facilities Construction fund. Over 30 years, NEON will quantify the impacts of climate change, land use, and biological invasions on terrestrial ecology by sampling key groups of sentinel taxa. NEON’s Terrestrial Organismal System (TOS) element acquires data through field sampling, measurements and observations of microbes, plants, small mammals, birds, insects and soils. Through the deployment of field teams within each domain, data samples will be acquired, processed and analyzed at laboratory facilities.
The Harvard Forest is part of the NEON Domain 1 (Northeast) core site.