A wonderful investment in studying America’s ecology is just starting.
I am indebted to The Economist for including in their issue of the 25th August a story about NEON, something I had previously not heard about.
It was then an easy step to locate the main website for the National Ecological Observatory Network, or NEON. (Just an aside that I can’t resist – NEON is such a fabulous acronym that one wonders how much push and shove there was to come up with the full name that also fitted the word ‘NEON’! Sorry, it’s just me!)
Anyway, back to the plot. The following video gives a very good idea of the projects aims. When I watched it, I found it inspiring because it seemed a solid example of how the nation, that is the USA, is starting to recognise that evolving to a new, sustainable way of life has to be built on good science. NEON strikes me as excellent science. You watch the video and see if you come to the same conclusion.
There’s also a comprehensive introduction to the project from which I will republish this,
In an era of dramatic changes in land use and other human activities, we must understand how the biosphere – the living part of earth – is changing in response to human activities. Humans depend on a diverse set of biosphere services and products, including air, water, food, fiber, and fuel. Enhancements or disruptions of these services could alter the quality of human life in many parts of the world.
To help us understand how we can maintain our quality of life on this planet, we must develop a more holistic understanding of how biosphere services and products are interlinked with human impacts. This cannot be investigated using disconnected studies on individual sites or over short periods of observation. Further, existing monitoring programs that collect data to meet natural resource management objectives are not designed to address climate change and other new, complex environmental challenges.
NEON, the first continental-scale ecological observatory, will provide comprehensive data that will allow scientists to address these issues.
Later on there’s more detail, as follows,
NEON has partitioned the U. S. into 20 eco-climatic domains, each of which represents different regions of vegetation, landforms, climate, and ecosystem performance. In those domains, NEON will collect site-based data about climate and atmosphere, soils and streams and ponds, and a variety of organisms. Additionally, NEON will provide a wealth of regional and national-scale data from airborne observationsand geographical data collected by Federal agencies and processed by NEON to be accessible and useful to the ecological research community. NEON will also manage a long-term multi-site stream experiment and provide a platform for future observations and experiments proposed by the scientific community.
The data collected and generated across NEON’s network – all day, every day, over a period of 30 years — will be synthesized into information products that can be used to describe changes in the nation’s ecosystem through space and time. It will be readily available in many formats to scientists, educators, students, decision makers and the general public.
For some reason I couldn’t find on the NEON website the informative map that was included in The Economist so I grabbed that one, and offer it below:
These eco-climatic domains are fully described here on the NEON website.
The benefits of this fabulous project are described thus, “The data NEON collects and provides will focus on how land use change, climate change and invasive species affect the structure and function of our ecosystems. Obtaining this kind of data over a long-term period is crucial to improving ecological forecast models. The Observatory will enable a virtual network of researchers and environmental managers to collaborate, coordinate research, and address ecological challenges at regional, national and continental scales by providing comparable information across sites and regions.”
As they say in business, if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it! So reading in the above the sentence, ‘Obtaining this kind of data over a long-term period is crucial to improving ecological forecast models.‘ is cheering to the soul.
The United States quite rightly gets a huge bashing over it CO2 emissions but to condemn the USA for that and not to applaud this sort of wonderful research is utterly unjustified. As I have hinted before, America has, more than any other country in the world, the energy to make things better over the coming years.
As Professor Sir Robert Watson highlighted here recently said, ‘… deep cuts in CO2 emissions are possible using innovative technologies without harming economic recovery.’
Amen to that!
Learning from Dogs 
What did you think of my acronym* for an international organisation to bring those responsible for this ecological catastrophe to account? (Namely the IBCC – the International Biodiversity Crime Commission.) In the meantime, NEON sounds like a very noble (groan) idea.
* As featured in http://lackofenvironment.wordpress.com/2012/08/29/a-riddle-for-the-uncritical/
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The published map is not that refined: it ignores the California fog belt and the Sierra Nevada, both of which have much wetter climes, with the world’s largest trees… And are up to 200 kilometers wide…
Another thing.
In depth thinking shows that proposed planetary engineering to cool the planet would probably make the situation worse. So the only “solution” for now is mitigation. That means bringing up the price of fossil energy (= carbon TAX).
It’s clear the Arctic is a goner: sea ice is still plunging, polyannas are opening not far from the pole.
Once ice is gone in summer (a matter of a few summers), it will quickly follow in winter, and the Greenland icecap will shrink on itself, like a big white mountain, while melting tremendously in July August. The unknown is whether the considerable warming of the Arctic ocean will be accompanied by tremendous methane outgasing.
Bioengineering may allow us to develop bacteria capable of swallowing the CO2 (“blue-green algae”). while making fuel.
Otherwise we will have to use thorium or thermonuclear fusion reactors to extract the CO2 from the atmosphere, using brute force. With tremendous energy, the CO2 can be frozen out, and then injected deep in the ground in the right places (a French program inject at 4.500 meters down…) That’s probably the only feasible solution. Weirdly, nobody has proposed to just froze the damn thing out.
Actually, it’s not so weird. Because it calls to realize that it would be even cheaper, with available tech, to simply outlaw fossil fuels. hence the present situation:
1) CO2 runs amok. Planet goes Jurassic in short order. Pandemonium, nuclear wars.
2) Tech advances and immensely powerful nuke reactors of some sort allow to prevent planet from going Venusian, by freezing enough CO2 out.
Meanwhile, as Larry Summers reportedly said at the White House:”Nobody is in charge, we are home alone.”
PA
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I think the Map is great! Although I am a bit confused by the status of Puerto Rico (how does a country come to be part of the US Commonwealth?), I mainly like it because it mentions the “Northern Plains”, which makes me think of this:
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Thank you Martin, and Patrice. Yes, there is much that can be levelled at the USA and many other nations but no progress ever came from only seeing fault in others. Your long comment, Patrice, above taken from your recent essay is an example, well to me it is.
I mean by this that despite the passion of your writings a failure, as I perceive it, to see something positive from time to time is as myopic as the present lack of recognition by the world’s leaders of the trend in global warming.
I’m going to stick my neck out and repeat what I said to Martin earlier on the telephone; that by the time the 46th American President takes office there will be a global movement underway to restore the health of Planet Earth. (That is assuming the 45th serves his full term of office!)
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Dear Paul: Thank you for thanking me, however, the comment was not taken from the essay, but modified from an answer to a comment to the essay.
I do not see the comment “as myopic”, nor lacking in positives. And I was not talking about “others” but facts.
I was not saying anything against my usual whipping boy, the USA federal government, just pointing out that there are truly only three remedies to the CO2 poisoning:
1) mitigation through efficiency
2) perhaps developing “algae” fuel (which absorbs CO2). This is implemented by the USA Navy, on ground of national security.
3) I was saying all the techs I have looked at against CO2 built-up, would backfire, it seems to me. Freezing CO2 out of the atmosphere will remain the only feasible solution, once we have cheap energy (probably nuclear).
I don’t see how that qualifies as “no progress ever came from only seeing fault in others. Your long comment, Patrice… is an example, well to me it is.”.
It seems to me that my long comment was an example of looking at solutions, and finding three, including a new one.
The same sort of complaints has been heard against philosophers, and they think. Everywhere, throughout the centuries, one has heard: “no progress ever came from only seeing fault in others. Your long comments, Philosophers, are example of this since they are men, and they thrive.”
This is why I have been attacked so many times (once with an Improvised Explosive Device… by fascists, in Paris, of all places…) and that is also why I have put deep trenches around my Ivory Tower. The philosophically correct was never politically correct, because truth is neither polished, nor polite to yesterday’s fossils.
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Patrice, my apologies, the day has slipped through my fingers. Will reply tomorrow. Paul
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