Ep 101: NEON: The promises and challenges of large-scale ecological research (with Scott Collins and Alan Knapp)
What is NEON? What hopes and concerns do we have for large-scale research projects in ecology?
On this episode of Big Biology, we talk about the challenges of doing…big biology! The National Ecological Observatory Network, or NEON, is a US National Science Foundation-funded project that has started collecting massive amounts of data from terrestrial and freshwater habitats across a network of sites distributed across the United States. Scott Collins, a professor at the University of New Mexico, and Alan Knapp, a professor at Colorado State University, have been involved in developing, promoting, and sometimes criticizing NEON. We discussed with them the successes and potential of NEON and the major challenges and controversies that it has faced. We also talked about how they believe NEON can have positive impacts in the future.
Cover photo: Keating Shahmehri
-
Cameron Ghalambor 0:07
When you think of Big Biology, what's the first thing that comes to mind?
Marty Martin 0:10
I guess for me, it's about the big ideas, ideas that changed the way we think about the science.
Cameron Ghalambor 0:16
Cool. But if you had unlimited funding and wanted to facilitate pursuing those big ideas in a field like ecology, how would you spend the money?
Marty Martin 0:25
Ah, tough question. I guess I would invest in projects that are beyond the scope of a single researcher, something like the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva that physicists have been big on. The big financial investment in that particle collider brought thousands of particle physicists together and resulted in the very first measurement of the Higgs boson.
Cameron Ghalambor 0:43
But ecological research is really different from physics. Ecologists aren't typically limited by access to technology like a particle collider. They're more limited by logistical challenges like paying for field technicians, or being able to collect data from more than just a single study site and the financial challenges of conducting long term research.
Marty Martin 1:05
True, so maybe I'd invest in a network of sites across a whole bunch of habitats where the same kinds of data could be collected and compared.
Cameron Ghalambor 1:13
Ha. Well, with funding from the US National Science Foundation. Your vision was realized in 2019 when the National Ecological Observatory Network or NEON went into full operation.
Marty Martin 1:25
Ah yes, NEON. NEON's, collecting data from 81 terrestrial and freshwater sites across 20 eco-climatic domains throughout the US. At each of these sites, various standardized environmental measurements are taken of climatic variables soil surface and groundwater and the timing of plant phonology.
Cameron Ghalambor 1:42
In addition, NEON samples the environment for a range of things including microbes, plants, fish, mosquitoes, small mammals, ticks, and even breeding birds. The scale at which these data are being collected is really impressive.
Marty Martin 1:56
But the story of how NEON came to be is long and sometimes controversial. Despite it being a huge investment for ecology, not all ecologists were supportive of the idea, and critics continue to be vocal about the NEON model.
Cameron Ghalambor 2:08
Unlike most ecological research that's initiated from the bottom-up by researchers, the NEON program was initiated from the top-down by the National Science Foundation at a huge financial cost. It costs $485 million US dollars to build NEON and an additional $65 million a year to operate it.
Marty Martin 2:30
Aside from the costs. Not all scientists agree with the philosophy behind a standardized top-down model of doing ecology. In addition, NEON management has been criticized for being more corporate than scientific.
Cameron Ghalambor 2:41
Our guests today, Scott Collins, a professor at the University of New Mexico and Alan Knapp, a professor at Colorado State University have played key roles in promoting and sometimes criticizing NEON operations.
Marty Martin 2:54
The research has been rooted in another ambitious NSF initiative, the Long Term Ecological Research Program, or LTER, which some see is a precursor to NEON.
Cameron Ghalambor 3:03
We talk with Scott and Alan about their research within the LTER program, and how the lessons learned influenced the development of NEON from within and outside the National Science Foundation.
Marty Martin 3:14
We also talked about the challenges of funding and selling the NEON program to the ecological community. And the various critiques and controversies that followed.
Cameron Ghalambor 3:21
Our conversation provides a behind the scenes look at the diverse challenges and future promise of one of the largest US investments in ecological research.
Marty Martin 3:30
And in full disclosure, I have a grant that is using the NEON sites to examine how habitat quality affects Lyme disease risk. I
Cameron Ghalambor 3:37
I'm Cameron Ghalambor
Marty Martin 3:38
And I'm Marty Martin.
Cameron Ghalambor 3:39
And this is Big Biology.
Cameron Ghalambor 3:52
Scott Collins and Alan Knapp. Thanks so much for joining us today on Big Biology. We're really looking forward to talking to you about your research and perspectives on the history status and prospects of the National Ecological Observatory Network or what's referred to as NEON. I'm big fans of both of your research, and I strongly associate both of your research programs with the LTER programs. So Alan, you know, you worked a lot at Konza Prairie before coming to Colorado State and still work there, I think and among other places. And, Scott, you're strongly associate your research with the Sevilleta LTER in New Mexico. And I guess I'm curious if you can provide some context for how your work with the LTER is maybe inspired or is kind of related to the larger NEON program at a national basis and, and whether there was some conscious connection between your personal research project grams at the LTERS and the establishment of NEON. Or if that sort of just happened kind of more by chance?
Scott Collins 5:07
Yeah, I'll start. So I started with LTER a long time, actually the Konza prairie LTR when I was a faculty member at the University of Oklahoma, and it was like the closest cool thing where there's a bunch of ecologists working together on grassland ecosystems and disturbances and all the stuff that was fun back in the 1980s. And shortly after that, I actually went to NSF as a program officer. And it was during my years at NSF that NEON started to become a reality. And there were two interesting things about the way it was handled. One was that LTER and NEON needed to be separated completely so that there was no confusion amongst people when they were requesting funding for NEON is like why, why do you want NEON if there's already LTR. But at the same time, they needed the LTR network, because it was an established network, which had a broad ecological reach and a lot of people that were already active in big collaborative science. So it's kind of schizoid, right at the start between them to separate them. But at the same time, one required a lot of information and knowledge from the other
Marty Martin 6:19
And Scott, can you tell us something about the kinds of research that you were doing in LTER, and sort of how that shaped what you were doing and thinking about neon at your time at NSF.
Scott Collins 6:32
So a lot of us within the LTR network, there was a big push for cross-site synthesis and integration to sort of bring datasets together. And one of the challenges in doing so is that the data aren't necessarily instantly compatible. So one of the goals from the standpoint of NEON was that we would actually establish a continental scale monitoring system, in which the data essentially were going to be compatible right from the start. And that we could start to ask some of those bigger questions. That was somewhat more difficult with just the way that LTR data were developed and the kinds of questions people were doing within individual LTR sites.
Alan Knapp 7:13
So I'm actually a, almost you could call me a child of the LTR network. So I started at the Konza prairie, the year they got funded. And I started as a technician, at the Konza prairie master's level technician, and I was tasked with installing the weather station, the rain gauges. So I really had this great view of the emergence of an LTR program at an individual site. And then just fortunately enough for me, over the course of my career, I essentially rose up through the ranks, if you will, of that LTR program and became the PI of program over time. And then the, you know, the PI emeritus as other people took over for me. But I've had this long, you know, long standing research interest in connection to the Konza prairie. And with regard to NEON, I think I totally agree with Scott that there was this original thought of separation between the two, or at least distinction, maybe as a better word to use between NEON and LTR. But those of us that the LTR sites were were very eager and keen to see how they could complement each other and how, you know, hopefully, that there would be more of a connection between what we thought we'd already established as these great research programs, not only at the site level, but at a larger scale, looking at cross-site questions, for example. And I think originally, at least, we sort of resisted, if you will, the hope that they could be totally distinct, because we really did see a lot of complementarity. And we hoped for a lot more interaction between the emerging NEON program and the existing LTR program.
Marty Martin 8:43
What were the kinds of things at the time that were hot, I mean, the sort of foci, the material that people thought would be interesting or important to, you know, consider across LTERs, or in the context of something like NEON?
Scott Collins 8:57
Well, you know, everything is about global climate change, or global environmental change, right, that sort of drives a large part of the ecological community. And so that sort of underlies a lot of what is going on and the type of measurements that are being made that are relevant to addressing issues about global environmental change. But again, the big push was just generality that one of the questions is like, how site specific is your information? And how do we integrate information across sites to get a more general picture about how ecosystems are responding to various global environmental change drivers? So that was a big deal, I think. I mean, driving LTER in its existence, as well as in NEON was about
Alan Knapp 9:42
And I think, you know, you think about LTR as a network, right? So I think about the Konza site this way. So we spent the first 10 years or so with our heads down right focused on our site and on the ground. But as a network of sites, we started off with fewer than 20 minutes, it's grown over the years. You go to The annual LTR all scientists meetings and you would hear about other LTR PI's and researchers talk about their research. And there's this natural tendency of scientists right to compare notes to say: "Wow, their sites are doing something differently than ours, or we see generality." And so emerging in the LTR program was this, let's move beyond our individual site. Let's look across sites look good at larger scale sets, look for comparable data, or let's try and figure out how to compare our data. So we can address questions beyond what's going on when your head is down and looking at the plots at your feet. But also ask those bigger questions that are related to climate change and global change and the bigger issues.
Cameron Ghalambor 10:38
Can Alan, can you give a kind of an example of like one of those kinds of moments where you were sitting at a meeting and you know, we're looking at listening to somebody else's presentation. And we're, and got really inspired about some of this kind of like cross-site comparison?
Alan Knapp 10:57
Yeah, for example, we focused a lot on controls of net primary production in our ecosystem. And we had seen other scientists, I remember the lake scientists comparing across lakes, and we realized that LTR has what are called core areas, core research areas, there's five of them, and one of them was what controls patterns and controls of net primary production in your ecosystem, we realized, this is something that all the sites are measuring. And it would be really interesting to look at those patterns and controls of net current production across as many sites as we can. And after about 10 or 15 years, we'd actually have some long term data to do this without just snapshots, but actually a real, I think, a real more comprehensive picture of what is controlling net primary production. And so we propose that to the other PIs. And I think we got together around 11 or 13 sites at the time to share their data with us and write a synthesis paper about those bigger, broader scale controls on net primary production in grasslands, in tundra, in forest, etc, in all the sites we could get to participate in. So those sorts of, again, bigger picture interests were bubbling up from the bottom right from the LTR network, that I think that's a natural tendency for scientists to be interested in how other sites compared to theirs, and how these broad scale patterns compared to what they see locally.
Marty Martin 12:15
So Scott, tell us some more about your experience at NSF because as I understand what Neon is, and we definitely want to turn and get into those details. It's some combination of the LTER network that we've been talking about with the LTE being the operative part, we haven't said much about that. But the typical lifespan of a grant coming from the National Science Foundation is four or five years. And so the long term is a much longer term investment in generating data. When one generates data like that it does two things, insight that wouldn't come and studying a couple of years. But then also this possibility of a network effect, multiple different entities looking at it. NEON, as I understand it, from what you just said, is that it provides a potential fix of one of the problems of LTER is some version of standardization of the data. So is that fair? Is that one of the things that sort of led people to advocate for NEON in the first place? Yeah, absolutely.
Scott Collins 13:11
So definitely trying to get standardized and more comparable data, and more comparable kinds of data sets across NEON. Because LTER sites are essentially bottom-up driven. They're driven by the science associated with that team, and the major questions for a given ecosystem. So NEON was to take a broader approach to what it was going to measure, and to try to have a lot more commonalities. And the second important difference between NEON and LTR, is that because the LTR network is built out through the proposal process, where they would make a call for proposals, evaluate proposals and select new sites, that the LTR network is not necessarily comprehensive with regard to the ecosystems in the United States or North America. And so NEON was deliberately distributed to cover a bunch of quantitatively defined sort of biogeographic regions, so that the information would be available in a more comprehensive way than what we got out of the LTR network. So those are two of the big differences.
Marty Martin 14:26
So let's turn to NEON. But I think connecting this to the sorts of things that are amenable the Insight offered by these large scale projects relative to the smaller shorter term kinds of things we talked about. Alan, you just mentioned that primary productivity is one of the big topics and nobody can question especially in the context of climate change that being an important one. Are there other large scale topics that warrant attention that haven't really been or that weren't considered by LTER? Maybe because of what you said Scott that the LTERs bubble up organically, wherever those PI's wherever those groups happen to be, maybe there's not going to be, you know, particular biomes included there. It's just an accident of history. Are there topics that do warrant attention that are maybe gaining attention in the context of NEON now, in this generalized space? Or we can turn that over? What kinds of questions maybe should we be pursuing using these big networks?
Scott Collins 15:21
So I would say that I think NEON has a more comprehensive effort, perhaps on looking at aspects of biodiversity that can relate to specific challenges. So a lot of their, as far as I understand, a lot of their biological sampling is something that you can relate to potentially emerging diseases. So they're keeping tabs on ticks and mosquitoes and small mammals, which are good vectors for zoonotic diseases. And so I think, you know, looking at things at that scale, and building up information that has direct application, and how that can be tied into climate change, is, I think, really important, and it's a very important thing that NEON is doing that is not really part of the LTR network.
Alan Knapp 16:08
I don't have them memorized but you know, NEON has, is it five Scott? Five grand challenges that they that they tend to highlight as areas that they're they're collecting data monitoring, information that is relevant to some some way shape, or form, you know, implicating the solution to those grand challenges that we have, and they have to do with biodiversity and climate change, and disease, invasive species, those sorts of things. Right, so there's a and so I probably can't say much more than what Scott just said, which is it certainly, NEON does fill some holes that the LTR network as a whole has, for many aspects of ecology. But I'm sure, and I know this is true, there are members of the community that would say that there are other areas, they wish NEON, holes that NEON would fill, that's not being filled by the NEON program, because they're funding limited, just like every program is. And so decisions have to be made about what you can do well, and what you can do across all of these sites in a fiscally, you know, responsible manner. And some things are just beyond what neon can do as well, as well as LTR. So I really couldn't add much more than that.
Marty Martin 17:13
Okay.
Scott Collins 17:14
But I think if I can follow up, I think, like I mentioned, the grand challenges that any of these programs like this have to have a focus, right. So if you consider the resources that created NEON started with infrastructure money, a lot of infrastructure money. And so once you have a lot of money, you can't just buy anything you want, you really need to build out something that has some goals that are going to be addressed over, in this case, like a 30 year timeframe. And so some grand challenges are going to, you know, they're going to address them, and some they're not, right? They can't do everything. And that those grand challenges were identified by, you know, National Academy committees and things like that. And any of these, what are called MREFC, funding lines from NSF are going to have to have, basically, you know, permission, or authorization from the National Academy saying, you know, this is a good thing to do, this will address these issues, and the community needs to move forward in this direction.
Cameron Ghalambor 18:16
Yeah, so that's maybe a good transition to talking about some of the funding and structure behind the NEON project. So I believe that NEON is the first program that was funded for the life sciences, using the kind of funding that is reserved primarily for really major projects like space telescopes, and particle accelerators. And so it's a network of approximately 80 sites across the country measuring all kinds of different things. And that certainly does not come on the cheap. But, as you mentioned, you know, the intention was to be able to ask these kinds of bigger scale questions. And I think at the time, Rita Colwell, the NSF program director said that neon would be an example of big, big biology, which maybe is appropriate for our podcast. But I think at the same time, there was a lot of confusion among sort of the boots on the ground. Ecologists in terms of like, what, what, what does that what does big, big biology actually mean in the context of this big network? And I remember being a graduate student and hearing people kind of grumbling about like, you know, it was neon gonna take money away from my ability to get a grant in the future. And were you hearing a lot of those same kinds of complaints or comments about putting something so ambitious out there?
Scott Collins 19:54
I know we're not supposed to have really long answers and that you're gonna wave your hands at me but I was at NSF when NEON was developed, and I was the first program officer. And one of the fundamental, I don't know, it's fundamentally different the way neon happened, because, yes, Rita Colwell was the director of NSF. And our division director is Bruce Hayden. And he was an amazingly clever and thoughtful person. And so all of that infrastructure money that NSF had been putting out there to build telescopes, and buy ocean going vessels and things like that, it's going to other directorates. The life sciences really wanted to be a big player, they wanted to be in big biology, as you were saying. And the way it happened was that the engineering directorate, got a distributed infrastructure network for earthquake engineering. That was the first breakthrough, to have something that was distributed to different institutions that had different strengths, and then they could tie together and they could enhance their capabilities and tie them together into a network.
Scott Collins 20:58
And as soon as that happened, Bruce Hayden said, you know, because biology wanted one of these things Bruce Hayden came up with just a basic outline of what NEON could be. And it caught fire within NSF, like he presented it to Mary Clutter, who was the director of the biological sciences, she was the head of that, and she and Rita Colwell, well, we're good buddies. And she took it up to Colwell, and Colwell loved it. And they just started asking for money from Congress, before we even thought this thing out, like how we were going to implement it. And so my job was to go out to the community, organize workshops, and try to sell them on this thing. Now, the telescopes and the boats, those are bottom-up driven, that's where the community, like the physics community says, if we don't get a synchrotron, we can't understand, you know, particle physics at all. So you need to build this, this new one. And, you know, and a subset of the community pushes for it. That's not what happened with NEON. NSF pushed that on to the community. And so it required a sales pitch at that point, to go around and talk about how the benefits were with the understanding that the money for this thing would come from other pools, that it would not interfere with individuals getting their own research grants. So we had to sell that to the community, it doesn't mean they bought it. But we had to sell that to the community.
Marty Martin 22:15
So can you say more about this big biology that Colwell, and others sold to Congress? Or to the general scientist? Or? I mean, they must have had something like a question, because what else are you going around marketing? If you don't have talking points?
Scott Collins 22:31
They had a desire for, you know, for a continental scale instrument that was going to essentially measure the environment and environmental change. That's, it really wasn't particularly well thought out right from the start. And for many years, Congress was like: "No, we're not going to give you the money. You haven't thought this out." So we would do these workshops. And we would build up some understanding, we get people engaged to try to talk about what neon could do, and the big questions you could ask. And then finally, we actually met one time with some congressional staffers on the House Science Committee. And they simply said: "You know, you guys, first of all, you need to give us, you know, millions of pages more thought and effort behind this thing, and you need to talk to the National Academy and get them behind it." And it was only at that point where congressional staffers told NSF people what to do that, you know, we started to move forward in a positive way.
Marty Martin 23:27
Okay.
Scott Collins 23:28
And, yeah.
Marty Martin 23:29
Okay. Okay. Yeah, go ahead.
Alan Knapp 23:31
So I could I can give my perspective on the other side, right. So Scott's at the National Science Foundation, and I'm in the trenches, and listening to these presentations about NEON. And I think NSF and Scott, they were incredibly effective right? They did allay our fears, I think right away about how this was going to compete with funding, this was not going to compete with funding from the normal research channels or normal research programs. This was an opportunity, this was a chance to get amazing funding into ecology, right? So I think early on, when we had all these meetings, NSF was incredibly good at selling the promise, you could almost argue too good it's selling the problem is because it got all of our hopes up so very high, we were told to dream big. We were told to as as they were asking for feedback from us, don't worry about dollars, right? Which is you never want to tell a scientist that, right? Because we dreamt very big thing about how this could benefit our research at our current sites, questions we couldn't address at the time, questions we might address in the future. And I think there was an amazing amount of time spent really thinking about wow, if we had these kinds of research dollars invested in ecology, just what could we do?
Marty Martin 24:44
So the concerns about the costs were alleviated because, you know, I mean, and they were because it was largely coming from different pots of money, but can we put numbers it is still dollars and it's I think useful to understand the scale of the investment. Tell me if I've got these numbers wrong, Scott, will it have cost about $2 billion to build this by the time it's done, and I think it's mostly done now, is that correct?
Scott Collins 25:06
No, it cost about $485 million, okay, to build it, the original allocation, and my numbers may be a little off. But the original allocation from Congress is $450 million for the infrastructure. And then they were behind budget, which is not unusual for infrastructure projects. And so I think additional funding had to come up, and had to be derived from biology to finish it out. Now, the annual budget is $65 million a year operating fund. That's the maintenance and operation budget. And so if you multiply that over 30 years, there is over $2 billion invested in NEON.
Marty Martin 25:45
Okay, that's what I was getting that number. Yeah, okay. Okay. So this may not be money that's necessarily competing with the bottom-up kinds of projects that you're talking about, Alan, but it is still, you know, it's still a large investment.
Scott Collins 25:55
Yeah, I will say this, the maintenance and operation budget comes out of the biology's research funds, right? The $65 million a year comes off the top of the Biological Sciences Directorate. It's money that's not going to the DEB or MCB. The other directorates and indirect funding programs. Alright. So there is that cost. The idea was that, over the years, as neon was being built out the biology directorates budget would increase to help cover the MNO costs, so that there was going to be no net, no impact on the funding programs.
Cameron Ghalambor 26:35
Interesting.
Marty Martin 26:36
Okay. But it seems like there's more there maybe the budget, the actual budget hasn't tracked the hope.
Scott Collins 26:41
I doubt it. I doubt the Biological Sciences Directorate has gotten more than $65 million of new money, so that there's money for NEON plus new money to do other things in biology. But I could be wrong. I don't track their budgets anymore. And they don't share this information with me.
Marty Martin 26:58
Yeah, sure. Sure. I mean, one could make the argument, I guess that there is an indirect benefit and a way that there's competition for funds. But if people applying to NSF are using NEON, then in a way they're getting an in kind contribution to their grants, right, they're able to take advantage of this resource. But that, of course, would assume that there's lots and lots of people that are using NEON, do you have any sense of like among the different biology directorates at NSF, any idea of the fraction of proposals that propose to use NEON? I would imagine that it's undersubscribed in the Molecular Biology Directorate right? I mean, it just seems like it would be this blots of opportunities that I could I could think of, but probably the division that you used to lead, Scott was the DEB, environmental biology. I mean, that presumably is the big one.
Scott Collins 27:49
Yeah, as far as I know, DEB is the big benefactor. And there may be some cross directorate programs that also benefit. I don't know much about proposal loads. I think there is a large interest in the datasets that are being generated across the ecological community. And those datasets are going to become more and more valuable as they age and mature. So one of the big challenges now is just, you know, how much can you gain out of a three year time sequence at some of the NEON sites, you know, they all kind of started up at slightly different times, before the whole instrument is now up and running. Now, some of those challenges versus where the place NEON will be in 10 years, I think it's going to be a hugely valuable resource.
Cameron Ghalambor 28:32
So Alan, I kind of wanted to come back to your your point about NSF and Scott being like good sales people for the NEON project. And it sounds like a fair number of people were convinced. But at the same time, there's also been a lot of criticisms. And there was a 2018 paper in frontiers in ecology and evolution, or Ecology and the Environment by David Lindenmayer, and Gene Likens. That was very skeptical of the sort of NEON concept. And, and I think, to sort of summarize their arguments, a lot of what they were saying was that there isn't sort of a hypothesis from the bottom up that is sort of driving the data collection. And so it's kind of data for the sake of data collection. And that is really going to sort of maybe, potentially, I think, in some ways, like kill ecology, and the creativity that comes from individual pi's. What are what are your thoughts on those kinds of criticisms?
Alan Knapp 28:32
So yeah, I've read that paper. I was a little surprised by it, particularly from Likens, only because I think those of us who again, came up in the LTR network realized there's value in both approaches, that there's value in having those questions. I mean LTERs collect a lot of monitoring data, hopeful monitoring day, in one sense, that those data might interesting patterns might emerge in the future, and questions you couldn't imagine addressing might be addressable in the future, right? So most people involved in the LTR network would recognize the value of both right, multiple ways of tackling the wicked problems that we have, right. And so as the LTR network matured, we started addressing questions we didn't envision addressing early on, just based upon the fact that we had these great long term datasets, again, at a site level and across sites. And so NEON it's just really emphasized that approach, right, the approach of collecting these data, in the hopes that they will be relevant to these grand challenge questions, and really important questions that will be important to answer in the future and can't be answered any other way except with a long-term set of data relevant to those questions. And so I was a little surprised by the tone of that particular article, because it seemed a little, you know, too focused on the bottom-up, we must have a question first approach, not recognizing how valuable these long term datasets and then these monitoring datasets have been, including those at Hubbard Brook right that they have used their to address some really interesting questions they had no idea would be of interest to them when they started collecting the data.
Scott Collins 31:17
Yeah, just to follow up, I mean, without getting too much in trouble with people like Gene Likens, and Lindenmayer. That's a very old philosophy of science. That's the Popperian philosophy that was outlined in like 100 years ago, and the philosophy about how we do science has changed as well. And there are other mechanisms that are considered, you know, valuable, as an approach and data mining is a valid way to start to ask questions, and people are going to go into these datasets with theory based questions that are going to take advantage of long time series and maybe multiple sites. And that's a valid approach to science that you have you come up with a question, and then you go out and tackle the datasets that will allow you to address those questions. And so we need to think about different ways about how we go about science today, you know, not just how we went about science 100 years ago.
Alan Knapp 32:12
I agree with Scott 100%. But having said that, sort of taking the devil's advocate view, you know, having the largest investment of funds into one approach, which is just the monitoring and answer the questions later, as opposed to a more balanced approach where you have hypotheses, bottom-up driven questions you can address right away, as well as the ability to monitor and data mine questions later, I think that may have been where they were coming from, because again, this was sold as the largest single investment in ecology out there. And to have it limited, in essence, took this one way of tackling these issues might have been part of the motivation, part of their concern.
Scott Collins 32:50
Right but at the same time, they didn't consider the fact that the LTR network is there to do the other half. And the idea is to integrate NEON and LTER, and there's a very strong effort to not push them apart anymore, but to actually use them as complementary networks.
Cameron Ghalambor 33:04
I think that also kind of touches on maybe another kind of almost like philosophical question about data collection, because I've heard people advocate for a lot of, you know, putting out cameras in forests, and using technology, rather than sort of boots on the ground. And some people being very uncomfortable with that type of data collection, because it removes the the human element of, you know, being able to be out in nature and observe patterns, is it again, and maybe another balance between taking advantage of technology versus using our creative human scientific intuition to pursue and pursue questions and collect data in interesting ways?
Alan Knapp 33:53
Yes, yes. Exactly. I mean, it's all about balance, right? Why would we not? Why would we issue right technology, if it's going to help us address these questions? So it's all about the balance that no one I think it would ever advocate for just instrumenting ecosystems and not putting boots on the ground at the same time, right. So it is about taking advantage of the technology that can help you understand things you couldn't understand with just boots on the ground alone.
Scott Collins 34:18
Right, I mean, there's still a lot of people going out. I mean, even NEON, a big part of their budget is people, right? There's no technology that's helping them trap small mammals or count mosquitoes, right. That I know of. So there's still a large component of NEON that is field based and people based, like my research program here at Sevilleta, we went in heavy into sensor technology and wireless networks. And the one thing I can tell you is it sounds cool, and it is, but that sensors break a lot. Sometimes they lie to you, you still get to go out in the field a lot and try to figure out what's happening out there. And so it provides you with a mechanism to measure variables you can't measure boots on the ground as well. So flux towers are important, but you can't, there's no real easy way to gather that data by sending a person out to get a comprehensive dataset and things like that. So it's a good combination of people in the field and cutting edge technology.
Scott Collins 34:51
Yeah, well, maybe we'll have a few more years before we have androids with embedded ChatGPT, and then all of us will just be sitting at our desks, we're breaking through artificial intelligence.
Marty Martin 35:36
So Scott, let's take a little bit of a turn to where NEON might go. Because there's, you know, decades of operating time left, it has fallen short, as we've sort of touched on for many different reasons. Its operations, you know, a lot of people have challenged their operations in the management. And you and Alan in 2019 wrote a really nice bioscience article about, you know, what, what we might do going forward, I thought it was a really, you know, constructively critical, productive thought piece about what next so in part of this conversation involves the current managers of NEON, the company Battelle. So can you tell us a little bit about what Battelle has done, the history of how they came to be involved, and then maybe what the future will hold or should hold?
Scott Collins 36:24
So we are on the record, suggesting that we're not enthusiastic about Battelle running NEON, and so we can continue with that. But how did they get involved? Well, the problem was that they had ecologists trying to run NEON in the construction phase. And ecologists are not organized like that they don't understand, you know, the structure of it, you know how to build a big piece of infrastructure. Battelle is fantastic at that. And in fact, I give Battelle all the credit in the world for coming in and fixing the construction phase of NEON, and bringing it back into a reasonable process, organizing it, and doing the best they can with the budget they had, yes, the cost overruns, and more money was needed. But Battelle saved NEON in the construction phase. Stepping into the management phase, my view was that they weren't connected with the research community, and that they were making decisions that was a little corporate, but they weren't really tied to what NEON was about or the people. Now within NEON, a lot of the staff are super dedicated. And they're working very hard. They were pushing themselves super hard to get datasets up, to get things running. I think the people are, are genuinely sincere about trying to do a good job and get the data out there. But what we find is that the data, people are still struggling to use some of the datasets. And that more effort probably needs to be put into QA, QC and getting data out there in more than just a raw form, right. Making it a little easier to use. I know Alan has some thoughts.
Alan Knapp 38:05
I do. And first of all, I agree with everything Scott just said. I do think Battelle deserves a lot of credit for rescuing, right, NEON in the operation or in the build out phase. I just feel that at this stage, but when I when I think about NEON and I think about the early meetings about the again, the promise of NEON, and I think about how our ecological community is engaged today or maybe not as engaged as they could be, I just see opportunity lost. I think about the International Biological Program, for example, a long ago which had its own issues and its own problems. But it was really run by ecologists in the field. Right and at the leadership level as well. And Scott is right, there are certainly ecologists at NEON, right, there's a lot of them and they are dedicated and they're really great. But that it's a pretty small subsection and my impression is that the broader ecological community really is not involved in NEON decisions, in NEON operations certainly. And we're losing that opportunity right to have like the expertise of the broader community really invested in NEON and and I think part of that has to do with the way NEON had to be built out, the requirements of the government to build this out, though, you know, this is a very this is very different from a research grant. Right? This is a very different beast. And so ecologists started off incredibly excited about it, and then sort of felt like okay, decisions are made. And now someone else is running NEON and you all just wait for the data to use it. And, you know, it just seems like that model is not the best model for taking advantage of the expertise we have.
Marty Martin 39:41
Yeah, Alan, can you say some more about that International Biological Program, because in reading, sort of preparing for a conversation today, I had no idea that such a thing existed. I mean, where did it come from? How does it relate? The difference in ecologists being heavily involved in its development and execution? I mean, what were the success stories with that INP that could maybe be used by NEON in the future.
Alan Knapp 40:06
So as old as Scott and I are, even we weren't around during the International Biological Program years, I am in an institution, Colorado State University, which was heavily involved in the International Biological Program. The grassland biome was centered here at Colorado State. And so there's still a lot there's people here who still remember those. And I remember those years, and I've talked to those folks, it followed the, and I'm probably gonna get this wrong, but the International Geophysical Year or something like that, there was it sort of an international effort, focus more on geophysical geophysics, I think, across the globe. And it was essentially followed up by this, well, let's do this for ecology as well, or for the environment as well. It was big science. In its day, it was big science, it was a big effort to get a lot of research funding into environmental change. I believe that the theme was the biological basis of productivity or something like that, that sort of is was what the funding came through from Congress based upon trying to understand that it was a it was a it was in the era where folks thought that you could build computer models of ecosystems, if you could just collect the data to parameterize them, and then you could, you know, truly understand how to manage ecosystems and, and understand how they worked.
Alan Knapp 41:22
And so it was a, again, a huge investment of funds, mostly in the US some in Canada, there was some in Europe as well. But mostly, even though it's International Biological Program, I think the US probably spent the most money on it. And the grassland biome was one of the first and one of the largest. I think there was a deciduous forest biome program as well, which was, again, a lot of ecologists. It was hierarchical, it was top-down, it had a goal. And in many cases, it was to parameterize these large ecosystem models. And it was about standardization, as well, it was about data repository. So a lot of the things we see in NEON today were essentially started in the international biological program. History generally says it wasn't a huge success. That is, those computer models don't exist, for example, that can that we can use now to understand ecosystems and predict their future and how they're going to respond to management, those sorts of things. But it was a huge success in terms of ecologist training and research dollars into ecology. A lot of good ecosystem models did come from that. And as I'm sure Scott can elaborate on more, that funding that went to the IBP program essentially started the Ecosystem Studies program at the National Science Foundation, that all ecosystem ecologists had benefited from since then. And so, but it was the precursor to LTR. I remember when LTR was starting, there was like, the same sort of issues we've talked about where neon has to be different from LTR. Well, LTR couldn't repeat the mistakes of IBP either, right? There was this hangover effect, about IBP. That made LTR's job a little bit harder to get off the ground. But yeah, so it sort of goes in succession like the IBP program, LTR program, NEON program as the three big science approaches to the environment over the years.
Marty Martin 43:10
Scott, I'm interested to hear you know what your take is on that. But you said something a minute ago, Alan, back to one of the earlier points of our conversation, the conceptual agreement, in a way, everybody was focused on productivity, it's not a hypothesis, per se, but it is a rallying cry of a sort is that is that perceived to have been any part of its success, even if most of its successes, creating lots of ecologists and the ecosystems program at NSF.
Alan Knapp 43:39
So my understanding is that it was actually much broader than that, originally, that there were many more, many other arms to IBP. But that's essentially what was settled upon it is, is something that could be accomplished that could be done. And so that focus probably did help a bit. Right, it certainly helped in terms of giving direction to the people who ran the biome programs, with regard to the kinds of data they were going to need if they're going to try and understand the biological basis of productivity and natural systems. So it certainly provided that framework in which to design the programs.
Scott Collins 44:11
IBP definitely had a broader initiative to start with, and it actually started in Europe to some international acronym. They sort of promoted it. And so the US scientists got together and agreed to be a part of the IBP. And as Alan was saying, it was kind of bottom-up driven. It was driven by ecologists and led by ecologists. And it led to collaborations because of some visionary leaders back a generation ago. And that ecologist actually went and got the money from Congress to support the IBP. So they got together, they essentially developed the proposal, and then would go testify in front of congressional hearings to ask for big chunks of money. And the Congress decided that it was worthwhile and put the money at NSF that was way IBP started. So NSF had all this chunk of money. And then, as Alan was saying that North America was divided up into biomes. There's a boreal forest biome, there was a desert biome, etc. And many of them were quite successful. So the desert biome was associated with the Jornada, which is in southern New Mexico, which is a USDA Agricultural Research Service Station, but it's also an LTER site now, and a lot of the LTR is a combination of the USDA or plus the IBP work that went on there. So there's, you know, a scientific linkage between certain places, just like Alan's site there, the shortgrass steppe, and the IBP.
Scott Collins 45:45
And then the IBP ended, it was a, it was a 10 year, actually, process and when the money was left, NSF reached out to the research community and said: "What should we do with all this money we have generated for the IBP, and we're not spending for that anymore." And the community had three workshops, and recommended ecosystem studies program, and LTER, so LTER is a direct descendant of IBP money. And, you know, the LTR network has just grown over time, as a consequence of being established back in that day. And you know, the question is, is it a failure, or not? Everybody likes to pick on what didn't get accomplished, but it created a different way of doing science. It was the first big ecology for real. And there's a book by Dave Coleman, who is part of the IBP, called Big Ecology. And it's sort of his very personal impression about the IBP, and how it happened, and all of that it's a really fun read. But it taught people to work on teams. And, you know, it taught people to think on bigger scales. And it really did change the way ecologists operated. And it made ecosystem science respectable. A lot of people didn't think ecosystem science was particularly valuable back in those days.
Alan Knapp 47:00
I think there was another valuable lesson from IBP, and that is, how hard it is to do team science. And how hard it is to have a top-down approach to science. Because as we all know, as you all know, right, but one of the advantages of being a scientist and having your own lab is you have the freedom to choose the questions you want to address freedom in terms of something as long as you can get those funded, the freedom to choose the questions you want to address, the directions you want to go the side projects we want to do.
Alan Knapp 47:26
And one of the, what I've read about IBP is one of the problems was it was pretty rigid and pretty structured, you will collect these data, we need these data for this purpose. And as you can imagine, a lot of scientists who, you know, might have been eager to participate in terms of the funding to their labs, sort of changed their mind over time, because what they were being told to do was not necessarily what they thought the best use of the money could be put forward. And so I think IBP sort of prepared us for future programs where we had to, we had to balance the two approaches, right? There's core data you might need, but you still have to have that autonomy, if you will, as a scientist to be able to ask interesting questions at the same time. And I think that really did get blended into the LTR sort of mindset really well, I think those lessons were learned.
Cameron Ghalambor 48:12
Well, I want to kind of circle back and touch on those points a little bit more. And so you know, this, this interplay between the bottom-up and top-down, and in your commentary about having ecologists more involved in running NEON? What exactly does that look like? How do you incorporate the ecological ecologist and the ecological community more in the running of what NEON is? Is that been administratively? Does it mean having a better intuition of what the needs of the community are? And being able to deliver that, like, what are the nuts and bolts of what that would actually look like?
Scott Collins 48:58
Well, if we want to model NEON on other infrastructure projects, you know, there's a thing called LIGO. It's a big physics thing. It's the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory, and they're looking for gravitational waves. Battelle doesn't run that. Physicists run that. There's a physicist in charge. And then there were, you know, advisory committees and you know, a structure where the scientists are sort of ruling that. My personal take on the NEON issue is that Battelle is now running this, and the decisions get made somewhere in Battelle about what's going to happen. But also NSF has its hands, perhaps too much in the management, or at least historically, of how NEON should work and what it should do and timeframes and all that. And I will admit that when I was at NSF, I had no clue how to run or even develop a major research infrastructure project like this, like I was completely out of my league on it. And I would argue that a number of the people who have been in charge in the bioscience as Directorate of NEON really didn't have a clue either. So you have kind of the wrong sort of people having a lot of influence on people that are sort of running the show, but nobody is really representing the community as the major driver of what NEON is doing and how it operates. And I think yes, it means that there needs to be an administrative class of ecologists, where somebody is going to say, this is going to be my job, and I'm going to, you know, be in charge and I'm going to make NEON the best it can be. And I'm going to, you know, really represent what the community is about, and what NEON can do and, versus the current structure that is now in place.
Alan Knapp 50:40
So Cam, I'm not gonna give you what you want, which is the nuts and bolts, which is because like, if I knew those, I would probably, I'd write another article, right with those in them. But I will say this, when I talk to people over beers, right about NEON, I think about the research vessels, or the telescopes, and I think about how they're used, right? And for example, the ticket observatory, right? It is scientists, right? Practicing astronomers compete for time to point that instrument to interesting places and use it. It's the same with the research vessel, right? You go to play, you write grants, and you use it and you go to parts of the ocean to address interesting questions. I feel like we have no ability to point NEON anywhere, right? We can't write a grant to say NEON should now focus on this or a subset or part of this instrument can be used to address this particular question. Instead, it's like the telescope is just has a set path across the sky. And we're to, in some sense, hope that it crosses a part of the sky that we're interested in. But we have no ability to point it to where we want to go. And that's sort of a lack of nimbleness. And I don't have the answer for how neon might be run to allow a little more of that, you know, allow scientists and allow ecologists to point where they want it to go, as an instrument. But it is frustrating, I think, as ecologists to not have that ability to be nimble enough as an instrument to address pressing issues.
Scott Collins 52:06
Yeah. But you know, but I think NEON can come back at us with the idea that there are mobile labs. That you can take these comprehensive, you know, vehicles out there and, you know, take advantage of them. I just don't know if we can afford them is the problem. It's not cheap to do that.
Alan Knapp 52:22
Yeah. Yeah, we're required to provide the funds for those, I believe, and there's not many of them. So when you think as a proportion, or a percentage of the overall budget of neon, it's a pretty small part that we can control.
Cameron Ghalambor 52:36
But can you imagine then, like a scenario where NSF puts out an advertisement for either a director or a board of directors, that goes out to the community and say, you know, here's a five year position funded through NSF to be in charge of the scientific direction and management of the NEON program.
Alan Knapp 53:08
So NEON has a chief scientist, right? They have a chief scientist in their program. They've had several of them over the years. And Scott could probably speak to this better than I can. But my impression is they're more advisory than they are, have the ability to actually make substantial changes, right? Because they don't have budgetary control. And as a result, they can certainly make suggestions right, you can again, provide that advice. But both Battelle and NSF seems to be that's where the negotiations are in terms of how the actual funding is implemented in running neon. Is that correct Scott?
Scott Collins 53:46
Yeah. I think that's right. Now the current chief scientist, was a division director at NSF for a while, so she is a smart person with regard to how to interact with the Biological Sciences Directorate. But I don't know how much influence that individual has. I know that prior scientific directors were frustrated and didn't stick around. They were frustrated with Battelleand with NSF.
Marty Martin 54:10
So just to come back a little bit to the 2019 article that we've sort of loosely been talking about for the last few minutes. You know Scott, you started by saying that you were directed as a Program Director of DEB to get out and spread the word about NEON. And I wonder what your perspective is on the use of NEON by you know, the many different varieties of biologists across the country. As I know, I guess the best name for me is organismal biologist or physiological ecologist. I knew about neon on accident when I was a graduate student, but then I didn't think about it again until you know, it doesn't really matter, but it's relatively recently.
Marty Martin 55:00
And in just the last few years, in the spirit of the disease ecology that we talked about just a little while ago, John Orrock at Wisconsin Madison and I started using NEON, are in the process of using the with an NSF grant to ask about the influence of habitat heterogeneity on Lyme disease risk across the country, by focusing on the small mammals that are good reservoirs. But the point is, as a physiological ecologist, I didn't really appreciate this as an opportunity. So I think some more advertisement of the kinds of things that exist, like that's facilitated not just by this surveillance network of collecting data and small mammals, but there's also a biorepository, where the samples are collected. And until I, you know, I knew that it didn't really realize the kind of work that I thought I could contribute to would be possible.
Marty Martin 55:45
What are the other sorts of things besides communication that we might do, and I'm going to use your words in case you want to launch off of one of those, there are five different points that you've highlighted in that bioscience article, keep the good, eliminate, self imposed constraints, value integration over independence, value ecological expertise, I think we kind of touched that one, imagine a Neon that produces more than data. So of those five, four, we already kind of talked about, which one do you think holds most promise, or is the one that we can make most progress with?
Scott Collins 56:18
I think the rigidness is what we're concerned about the rigidness, about the way data are collected so that some of the datasets are less reliable than others, because it's not the way to collect them in a different environment. So we were saying that there might be more flexibility in the way things are measured, there might be some regional things that might be valuable to collect that you don't need to collect everywhere, you know, and that would require a little bit of scientific input on what that might be. So my original conception of NEON was that it was going to be half fixed infrastructure, and half regionally relevant science that would engage that subset of the research community. And they would sort of drive that science agenda, which might change over time as they learned about things. So it was a much more flexible, original model. There was hardcore commonalities across all the sites, but then there were a lot of resources built in for more of an LTER-like approach you would tie all that infrastructure into. So that's the thing that I think could be done more with the NEON world is a little more flexibility, and less of that rigid, everybody does everything in the same way, kind of approach.
Alan Knapp 57:29
I agree. I think of all those the self imposed- well, I think gettine ecologists more involved is certainly key. But I think these self-imposed, I think they're self-imposed constraints. When I think back again, we talked earlier about how NEON developed in the input from all the research scientists in the community, and sort of the promise that everyone thought they could have some part of NEON that would be relevant to them. And then over the years, right, so it's like, well, we really can't do this, we really can't do that we really can't do something else. And oftentimes, the reasons were, well, because the program won't allow us, right, there's a constraint or we must do it this way, this is where we have to do it. And these aren't negotiable items, so the standardization, data collection, and all those sorts of things. And so people got a little, you know, people tried to find other ways. Other ways to make NEON for more user friendly, and less rigid.
Alan Knapp 58:17
Melinda Smith led this big group to look at how you might impose some experimental infrastructure or include some experimental infrastructure into neon in part of the budget, so that then scientists could actually use that, like big greenhouses or other kinds of climate change experiments that scientists could take advantage of. And that group spent a lot of time devising that NEON was very supportive. NEON funded them to hold a series of workshops and get together and come up with plans for how these experimental approaches might be included in the modern approaches. And then ultimately, a decision was made as well, there's a constraint, we can't do it. We're not allowed to do it. There's a reason we never fully understood the reasons why. But you know, again, there's this sort of, well, we're sorry, great ideas, we'd love to include it, but we can't. And so after a while, as Scott said, you sort of get this feeling that it is just so rigid, that it's really hard for folks to, unless the data are particularly relevant to what you're asking at the time, it's hard to really think about ways you could make it less inflexible.
Scott Collins 59:18
I mean, this is the time to do it, right? This is the time where the whole instrument is sort of operating, some data streams are coming in. And you can start to think about the type of data you're getting, and what you could, you know, change. Right, do it now and be adaptive and make NEON a little more of an adaptive instrument that would get at some of what Alan was using, with his analogy about how you can direct the instrument here and there. I think that kind of flexibility would be doable, you'd have to have the right management and the right process to get input for things like that to happen and some budget flexibility.
Marty Martin 59:56
Yeah, my narrow experience. I mean, it's just this one project and it's only been going on for a few years. But when I first thought about using NEON, I was terrified by the bureaucracy that was likely to be involved with trying to work with a behemoth like this. But it has been incredibly refreshing when we're asking for kind of quirky, weird things at one different place that they can mobilize. I mean, like you guys had been alluding to the folks that work for NEON, the on the ground, scientists blow me away with their generosity and communicativeness and willingness to help. But I was pleasantly surprised, is kind of the point, in their willingness to at least try to be nimble, and try to ask for the things that, you know, at least a little while ago was, oh, we can't do this. It's, you know, anathema to even consider doing that. Any major departures from the original plan? So it's been a pleasant surprise.
Cameron Ghalambor 1:00:46
Yeah, I think, on the other hand, you know, the, in some ways, the promise of of having a ecological observatory network is that by standardizing you are, you'll also have the power of making comparisons that aren't confounded by, you know, variation in the way the data were collected. And I think the real, hope or promise that a lot of people have is that these kinds of data can be used, potentially for ecological forecasting. And so I don't know if you saw this paper, but it was led by Tom Quinn that was also in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, where they advocate for this vision of NEON to play a bigger role in the ecological forecasting challenges. And I'm curious what you think about that, because maybe that's a little bit still, perhaps, ambitious? Or maybe you still may be within the realm of what's currently possible, given the constraints that, you know, we were just talking about being flexible versus rigid?
Scott Collins 1:01:54
Well, forecasting is an interesting goal. And it's important, you know NEON, I think it's going to get there, you know, the LTR network has 30 to 40 years of data streams already. So forecasting is available and doable by ecologists to start with, but you know, it is a big goal of NEON. And some of the people that are in charge are involved on the, what's called the Scientific Advisory Committee, the external science advisors, that is their research emphasis is forecasting. So they will, I assume, helped bring NEON along over time into that capability. But right now, I mean, a data stream of three or four years, I'm not going to necessarily be comfortable with a forecast going out 30 from that personally. So I don't think NEON is there yet.
Marty Martin 1:02:44
Any thoughts on that, Alan?
Alan Knapp 1:02:45
All I could do is echo Scott's comment. So there are I think that article was mostly about the, again, the promise of NEON. So arguing that you know, this is something that NEON will be incredibly valuable for in the future, in bringing that to the awareness of people. Because I think NEON does have well, let's just face it, it has a bit of a bad rap for some ecologists, right, that there are people who are more pro-NEON, there are people who are more less pro-NEON, let's put it that way. And I think those kinds of articles are important, right? To those who are skeptical about the, you yourself mentioned that you might have been skeptical at one time, before you used it. It's a way to keep NEON on the front page as well. Right, to let people know that, hey, this resource is happening, it's getting better and stronger and longer term with every year, and it will be able to provide value in the future.
Alan Knapp 1:03:34
It may be a reflection of the fact that for everyone, you know, like you who's had success using the NEON data, I've talked to people who've struggled with the NEON data as well, for any number of reasons not meeting their expectations, right? They thought they were collecting- it could just be misinformation. So they thought they were collecting something that wasn't what they wanted, interpretation of the data, all those sorts of things. So and I think that's to be expected, I'm sure with LTER it's the same thing, right? So people go to the LTR website, they think there's going to find something great. And what they find doesn't have the resolution they need or the temporal, whatever they need, right. So I'm sure that's not just a neon issue, in general.
Scott Collins 1:04:12
Yeah, it's not unusual at the start of something that the community questions and they question the value and that there are papers that are written to sort of argue in favor of the value. This happened at the beginning of the LTR network. Right, there was a very important paper published by Tom Callahan, who was in charge of LTR at the time in 1984, laying out why, you know, LTR exists and what it was going to do, and it's really important to start.
Scott Collins 1:04:37
When in the LTR network, we started with urban sites. The ecologists were appalled, because ecologists don't want to go into urban environments, they want to go out and find the last piece of remnant tropical forest and study the hell out of it. And so the urban people when they were funded, they would write all these papers about why it's okay to study urban ecosystems. And after four or five years of that, we were like: "Stop telling us it's okay, just write the papers and people will accept it." And I think that's what's going to happen with NEON, it's like, there are all these things that NEON can do. And this is NEON, and that's NEON, but people are just going to start generating good science out of NEON, and then they're not have to stop, they will need to write papers about why NEON is a good thing.
Cameron Ghalambor 1:05:17
So I have kind of one question that maybe integrates across a lot of the things that we've talked about. One is this advertisement and accessibility of the neon sites to sort of a broader ecological community, or maybe just larger life science community. And that relates to other kinds of infrastructure that haven't really been talked about, which is like having NEON sites become foci for other researchers, diverse kinds of researchers. And by that, I mean, actually like investing in housing for people to stay at, lab space for doing, you know, lab based research. And I guess my analogy is that, you know, whenever like a national park is created, the nearby city becomes, all of a sudden, a boom town for tourists, people start coming through and there's economic development that happens there. And I guess I'm wondering what your thoughts are on this, that if it's compatible with neon that in the future, there could be other kinds of infrastructure that promote more use of the sites. So there's the long term data, but then having places for people to stay like at some of the LTR sites, I know, you know, there's housing. Has that ever come up in conversation? As far as like another way of investing and expanding the program?
Alan Knapp 1:06:55
So early on, there was talk of a bricks and mortar component to NEON as well, to serve a variety of different purposes, labs on sites, or housing, or those sorts of things. But I think it's fair to say that much of NEON's history has been downsizing, right. Actually calculating the cost and realizing we can't afford to do this. And NEON went through this big sort of downsizing in terms of the types of data that we collect the frequency of the data, they collect the types of sensors they could have. And it really did it, as they realized how expensive it was going to be to build this instrument out, it really did get pared down a lot from what those original plans were, for the community at large. And so whether there's an appetite now to reinvest, right, to put more resources back into NEON, that's a great question.
Scott Collins 1:07:46
Yeah, I mean, it's an interesting idea. Part of it depends on where the site is, right? It's on there on all kinds of different properties. And so some places you can't, right. But like one of the satellite sites in the desert biome is at the Jornada. So it's a research site, you can get access to the place, but you have to get access to it through USDA, right. A Konza prairie site, you can get there's at a field station, there's housing there, there's labs there at Konza. So some of the places do offer that already. The question is, you know, which sites would be suitable for added infrastructure that might draw scientists to that site?
Scott Collins 1:08:32
And I personally like that idea, because I am also a field station person, right? I think they're fundamentally important for field biology and getting people outside and bringing students early on in their careers to a NEON site and having them see all this cool stuff and jobs, and what's going on is a great way to market a blend of technology and field ecology. But I don't think anybody is really talking about that kind of infrastructure. It could be proposed, and there are programs I think within NSF, like there's an infrastructure program, that's not giant, but it's not too small, that could maybe be tapped into.
Alan Knapp 1:09:10
Having said that, though, I'm not sure the way NEON is currently constituted. No there's like, they would be open to let's say, if there was housing at Konza and someone wanted to go there and said, I want to go do things in your NEON footprint. I think they would say no. Right, we don't want you in our footprint. You can work on Konza, right, but you know, we are working at our NEON footprint. We have our people collecting these data, we really don't want to have someone in there, potentially compromising, right, the data we're collecting. Working under the footprint of the flux tower or perhaps sampling over the top of something else we're doing. So I don't get the impression that NEON is set up to encourage scientists to come in and work particularly at their site. Adjacent to their site, certainly would be true, but I could be wrong, but I'm not convinced it'd be a well accepted opportunity that NEON would offer.
Marty Martin 1:09:59
Well guys, this has been fantastic. I'm starting to get sensitive to the fact that we've been going on about an hour and ten. But before we wrap, we always like to give our guests a chance to talk about any topic that we didn't prompt you. So is there anything Alan, Scott, that you would like to say?
Alan Knapp 1:10:17
I guess, we want to make sure we, at least I want to make sure right, that we don't overlook the fact that NEON does have scientific advisory groups, they have these groups called they have, a group called STEAC. And Scott can tell you what that acronym stands for. They have these small working groups of scientists involved in all of their data collection protocols, where they regularly solicit input from the community. And so it's not like they're truly isolated from the community at all, there is opportunities to have input.
Alan Knapp 1:10:48
So I think that's important to make that point that we don't want to, well I don't want NEON to be painted as this completely divorced monolith from the rest of the community. It just, as we talked about before, it gets back to the effect that input can have in a relatively rigid and inflexible program, right? So you can solicit the input, you can get the opinions, but it seems to be pretty hard to steer the ship at this stage.
Alan Knapp 1:11:11
And as Scott said earlier, I think this is the time, if we want to make course adjustments. This is the great time to do it. Ten years from now people can say we already have ten years of this data, we don't want to we don't want to change anything. But when we only have a few years right now is the time to think about how we could integrate other long term datasets where are the overlap, where we can perhaps reallocate NEON money elsewhere, because someone else is already doing this? And we could just use their data to address these questions. And we don't need to be collecting data that might be redundant. I think this is this is a great opportunity now. This is the time to reanalyze, reassess. And if you're going to do it, this is when we should do it.
Scott Collins 1:11:50
So yeah, I do have a slightly different follow up that I think is important. So we were referred to as grumpy old men on social media associated with our comments about neon. And we have embraced that. We are in fact, grumpy old men. But our complaints I think were misunderstood. Or complaints were more about the management and rigidness of NEON, not about NEON in general. NEON is here to stay. And we would like it to be the best thing it can be. Rightw? That is honestly our goal. We're not trying to kill NEON, we're not trying to shut it down. We just have some ideas, very vague ideas, about how it could be even better. And that is what our grumpiness is about.
Marty Martin 1:12:36
Okay, good, good. Well, hey guys, really, thanks. It's been a pleasure. It sounds like all great stuff and advocacy to me that we're all looking to make the best of this fantastic resource. So let's hope that that happens.
Cameron Ghalambor 1:12:59
Thanks for listening to this episode. If you like what you hear, let us know via Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or leave a review wherever you get your podcast. And if you don't well, we'd love to know that too. All feedback is good feedback.
Marty Martin 1:13:12
Thank you to Steve Lane who manages the website and Ruth Demree for producing the episode.
Cameron Ghalambor 1:13:17
Thanks also to interns Dayna De La Cruz and Kyle Smith for helping produce this episode. Keating Shahmehri produces our awesome cover art.
Marty Martin 1:13:25
Thank you to the College of Public Health at the University of South Florida, the College of Humanities and Sciences at the University of Montana and the National Science Foundation for support.
Cameron Ghalambor 1:13:34
Music on the episode is from Podington Bear and Tieren Costello