NEON: Transforming Environmental Data into Information for Societal Benefit

The National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) ("the Observatory"), is a NSF funded national investment in physical and information infrastructure.  The Observatory's goal is to enable understanding and forecasting of the impacts of climate change, land use change and invasive species on continental-scale ecology by providing physical and information infrastructure to support research, education and environmental management in these areas.  NEON provides vetted and authoritative data and information to scientists, educators, decision makers and the public on how land use, climate change and invasive species affect biodiversity, disease ecology, and ecosystem processes.  NEON high-level data products are designed to enable ecological forecasts and analyses at a continental scale and facilitate the observation of decadal scale changes against a background of seasonal-to-interannual variability.   We foresee an ecosystem of government, NGO, and academic data sources that will serve as credible producers of linked data, promote data sharing, and champion responsible data life cycle management.  This, together with interoperability initiatives and web-enabled tools, will open up the marketplace of ideas on ways to synthesize ecological data into meaningful information for societal benefit.  The poster outlines a framework for transforming data into information to help inform resource management, socio-economic analyses, environmental risk management, and decision support for climate change mitigation and adaptation.