NEON and on

摘要

After years of wrangling, scientists in the United States are set to wire up the natural landscape to a state-of-the-art environmental monitoring system. The National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) will take Mother Natures pulse and track her vital signs during both bad times and good. In the coming years, NEON will pour massive quantities of biological and physical data from plains, forests and lakes into computer spreadsheets to look for trends (see page 135). It is a bold initiative whose time has clearly come, but it will take more than the flip of the on switch to make NEON glow. The projects elegance is appealing, but behind its beguiling simplicity lurk a number of potential pitfalls. Some are technical: it would be foolhardy to underestimate the challenge of collecting hundreds of data streams in a uniform manner across dozens of sites and over the course of decades. Others are social and institutional: ecologists have long gathered data independently; NEON represents a dramatic shift towards the kind of collective data-driven system that physicists and astronomers have been pursuing for decades. How will it be received on the ground? And what's more, how many scientists will be ready to use the data when they come in?