NEON LTAR Workshop: Identifying Continent Scale Questions and Approaches for Advancing the Sustainable Intensification of US Agriculture

New networks of agricultural and wild/natural research sites – including the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON), the Long-term Agroecosystem Network (LTAR), and the Long-term Ecological Research Network (LTER), among others – have the potential to inform best ways to approach large-scale problems. This workshop will bring together researchers working in these networks to identify opportunities and barriers for understanding linkages across scales, and to explore ways that sites within networks could better optimize data products, measurements, and new sensor technology to address emerging national-scale problems.

The results of this workshop have implications for US agriculture as it faces increasing pressures to meet emerging demands for food and other agricultural products while better conserving natural resources and protecting the environment. These challenges, faced by agriculture, are expressed at the farm and ranch scale, but the effect of individual decisions by individual farmers and ranchers scale rapidly to create regional to national effects.

The proposed exploration of intersectionality across natural/wild and agricultural systems allows for the identification of sustainable solutions that convey global benefits.

The University of Michigan -Kellogg Biological Station is funded to implement a workshop intended to identify ways to advance continent-scale agricultural science by leveraging resources of the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON), the Long-term Agroecosystem Research Network (LTAR), the Long-term Ecological Research Network (LTER), and other U.S. agricultural and ecological research sites. Through a series of facilitated virtual meetings, workshop participants will discuss and identify a) synthesis activities that can be undertaken now by focused technical working groups via follow-on workshops and data analysis, and b) prioritized measurements that could be initiated soon in order to contribute to future opportunities for addressing important continental-scale questions informed by data from these networks, yielding broader societal benefits, i.e., the sustainable intensification of agriculture.

Participants will explore scientific questions reliant on scaling (spatial or temporal), and questions related to interoperability among network nodes, data harmonization, measurement technologies, training, and organizational needs.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.