RCN: Integrating Organismal Biology into NEON

A central goal in the life sciences is understanding how organisms will cope with environmental change. This project funds a Research Coordination Network (RCN) that bring will together a diverse group of biologists to identify how to best leverage NEON data and infrastructure to address pressing questions about how organisms will cope with environmental change.

The National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) and its associated infrastructure represents one of the largest infrastructure investments by the National Science Foundation. NEON serves as an observatory to document ecosystem change through 30-years of consistent data collection at a series research sites across the United States. The RCN will develop a professional network whose members are diverse in background, expertise, and career stage, host workshops and symposia that focus on the potential of NEON to answer key questions in organismal biology and provide training experiences for the next generation of researchers through research exchanges.

As a whole, the RCN will broaden participation of under-represented groups across career stages, develop podcast episodes to enhance scientific and technological understanding of concepts related to NEON, and generate new participatory science activities for the general public. Finally, this RCN will enable research that have direct relevance to human health and the US economy, such as knowledge of the presence and drivers of disease, their spread through animal populations, and how environmental change may exacerbate these threats.

NEON presents a unique opportunity to produce novel insights into fundamental biological questions, yet there are currently disparities in use of NEON by researchers from different fields of biology. Ecologists have taken the lead with using NEON data to investigate the responses of populations, communities, and ecosystems to environmental change. However, the potential of NEON and its associated infrastructure have not been fully realized by organismal biologists.

This missed opportunity is despite the fact that NEON is well-suited for answering some major questions in organismal biology. Organismal biologists use diverse and integrative approaches to understand variation in the behavior, physiology, and life histories of organisms and how these multiple traits interact across environmental gradients and produce population differentiation.

Through the use of NEON, there is great potential for organismal biologists to help reveal how genotypes become phenotypes and discover new patterns at spatiotemporal scales that have not previously been possible. Organismal biology research using NEON resources has lagged behind because of a lack of awareness by researchers of NEON’s goals, infrastructure, and capacity.

This RCN will diversify and strengthen NEON usage by incorporating organismal biologists into the community of NEON users and by promoting interactions between ecologists and organismal biologists.

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.