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Greetings,
Spring has arrived and with it, preparations for NEON’s seasonal data collection. We are delighted to welcome this year’s excellent cohort of seasonal field technicians to NEON to support the data collection. If colleagues, students, or you are interested in joining a field team, please view the remaining open positions.
The Airborne Observation Platform (AOP) flight campaign began this month with the calibration flights, critical for collecting the high-quality data that is heavily used by the research community. Collection at our San Joaquin Experimental Range NEON field site in CA is scheduled for April 5-8. If you are interested in tracking the 2026 flights, view the current AOP schedule here and sign up to receive daily flight report emails or visit our flight report archive throughout the season.
Did you know you can use NEON’s AOP infrastructure for research needs outside of NEON field sites? NEON Research Support Services (NRSS) makes components of NEON’s infrastructure and a variety of other support services accessible to the community for research and other activities. You can leverage NEON’s AOP, towers, field sites, buoys, remote sensing equipment, expert and trained staff and more, all through the NRSS program. I note a recent change, that while the MDPs have provided value in select cases, we have discontinued this service to focus on those that deliver the greatest overall impact. Learn more about the NRSS program in the featured expert section of this newsletter, and read an example in our blog of how Dr. Laura Meredith and her team at University of Arizona have utilized NRSS, “Data in Action: Soil Microbes and Atmospheric Hydrogen.”
I also would like to give you notice of two upcoming changes to NEON’s data-user experience: Starting in June 2026, NEON data users will be required to have a user account to download data, and the NEON data license will be updated from CC0 to CC BY. In recent years, the number of automated bots and data scrapers has increased drastically. These changes will help us ensure reliable data access for the NEON user community, clarify expectations for attribution, and improve our understanding of how these NSF-funded NEON data are used so we can better serve the community. To learn more about these changes see our recent data notification, “Upcoming Required Logins and Data Licensing Updates.”
As the weather improves and many of you head into the field, we wish you the best!
Sincerely,
Paula Mabee, Chief Scientist and Observatory Director at NEON, Battelle
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