The National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) is a Nation Science Foundation funded continental-scale observation facility operated by Battelle and designed to collect long-term open access ecological data to better understand how U.S. ecosystems are changing. The comprehensive data, spatial extent and remote sensing technology provided by NEON will enable a large and diverse user community to tackle new questions at scales not accessible to previous generations of ecologists.
During site construction of all terrestrial field sites, a full soil profile was described and sampled by Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) Soil Scientists near each NEON tower called the "megapit". Megapit criteria was to be located in the locally dominant soil type, near the instrumented meteorological tower (or flux tower) and is selected to be representative of the soil sensor locations.
In addition to the NEON megapit, NRCS further collected soil pit samples from a number of 1 meter deep pits distributed throughout NEON sites for a one-time characterization of soil properties for "distributed plots". NEON worked with the Kellogg Soil Survey Laboratory (KSSL) to perform a suite of chemical and physical analyses on each soil horizon sample collected from the megapit and distributed pits.
For more information on the initial soil characterization follow these links at data.neonscience.org
- Initial Characterization of the NEON:
- Megapit soil physical properties
- Megapit soil chemical properties
- Initial Characterization of the NEON:
- Distributed plot soil physical properties
- Distributed plot soil chemical properties
For each NEON site, reports were also completed by NRCS soil scientists based on the initial soil characterization of the Megapits and Distributed plots. Those reports, along with complete soil morphology, can be viewed for each NEON site at the NEON data portal under the Soil Characterization Summaries.
Here is an example site map of the Barrow Environmental Observatory near Barrow, Alaska showing location of the distributed plots and tower 'mega pit' plot.
