An official website of the United States government
Two programs that provide high-quality long-term ecological data, the Environmental Data Initiative (EDI) and the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON), have recently teamed up with data users interested in synthesizing biodiversity data, such as ecological synthesis working groups supported by the US Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) Network Office, to make their data more Findable, Interoperable, Accessible, and Reusable (FAIR). To this end: we have developed a flexible intermediate data design pattern for ecological community data (L1 formatted data in Fig. 1, see Fig. 2 for design details) called "ecocomDP" (O'Brien et al. 2021), and we provide tools to work with data packages in which this design pattern has been implemented. we have developed a flexible intermediate data design pattern for ecological community data (L1 formatted data in Fig. 1, see Fig. 2 for design details) called "ecocomDP" (O'Brien et al. 2021), and we provide tools to work with data packages in which this design pattern has been implemented. The ecocomDP format provides a data pattern commonly used for reporting community level data, such as repeated observations of species-level measures of biomass, abundance, percent cover, or density across multiple locations. The ecocomDP library for R includes tools to search for data packages, download or import data packages into an R (programming language) session in a standard format, and visualization tools for data exploration steps that are recommended for data users prior to any cross-study synthesis work. To date, EDI has created 70 ecocomDP data packages derived from their holdings, which include data from the US Long Term Ecological Research (US LTER) program, Long Term Research in Environmental Biology (LTREB) program, and other projects, which are now discoverable and accessible using the ecocomDP library. Similarly, NEON data products for 12 taxonomic groups are discoverable using the ecocomDP search tool. Input from data users provided guidance for the ecocomDP developers in mapping the NEON data products to the ecocomDP format to facilitate interoperability with the ecocomDP data packages available from the EDI repository. The standardized data design pattern allows common data visualizations across data packages, and has the potential to facilitate the development of new tools and workflows for biodiversity synthesis. The broader impacts of this collaboration are intended to lower the barriers for researchers in ecology and the environmental sciences to access and work with long-term biodiversity data and provide a hub around which data providers and data users can develop best practices that will build a diverse and inclusive community of practice.
more »
« less
Standardized NEON organismal data for biodiversity research
Abstract Understanding patterns and drivers of species distribution and abundance, and thus biodiversity, is a core goal of ecology. Despite advances in recent decades, research into these patterns and processes is currently limited by a lack of standardized, high‐quality, empirical data that span large spatial scales and long time periods. The NEON fills this gap by providing freely available observational data that are generated during robust and consistent organismal sampling of several sentinel taxonomic groups within 81 sites distributed across the United States and will be collected for at least 30 years. The breadth and scope of these data provide a unique resource for advancing biodiversity research. To maximize the potential of this opportunity, however, it is critical that NEON data be maximally accessible and easily integrated into investigators' workflows and analyses. To facilitate its use for biodiversity research and synthesis, we created a workflow to process and format NEON organismal data into the ecocomDP (ecological community data design pattern) format that were available through the ecocomDP R package; we then provided the standardized data as an R data package (neonDivData). We briefly summarize sampling designs and data wrangling decisions for the major taxonomic groups included in this effort. Our workflows are open‐source so the biodiversity community may: add additional taxonomic groups; modify the workflow to produce datasets appropriate for their own analytical needs; and regularly update the data packages as more observations become available. Finally, we provide two simple examples of how the standardized data may be used for biodiversity research. By providing a standardized data package, we hope to enhance the utility of NEON organismal data in advancing biodiversity research and encourage the use of the harmonized ecocomDP data design pattern for community ecology data from other ecological observatory networks.
more »
« less
- PAR ID:
- 10396582
- Author(s) / Creator(s):
- ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; more »
- Publisher / Repository:
- Wiley Blackwell (John Wiley & Sons)
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Ecosphere
- Volume:
- 13
- Issue:
- 7
- ISSN:
- 2150-8925
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
-
Abstract Soil microbial communities play critical roles in various ecosystem processes, but studies at a large spatial and temporal scale have been challenging due to the difficulty in finding the relevant samples in available data sets as well as the lack of standardization in sample collection and processing. The National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) has been collecting soil microbial community data multiple times per year for 47 terrestrial sites in 20 eco‐climatic domains, producing one of the most extensive standardized sampling efforts for soil microbial biodiversity to date. Here, we introduce the neonMicrobe R package—a suite of downloading, preprocessing, data set assembly, and sensitivity analysis tools for NEON’s newly published 16S and ITS amplicon sequencing data products which characterize soil bacterial and fungal communities, respectively. neonMicrobe is designed to make these data more accessible to ecologists without assuming prior experience with bioinformatic pipelines. We describe quality control steps used to remove quality‐flagged samples, report on sensitivity analyses used to determine appropriate quality filtering parameters for the DADA2 workflow, and demonstrate the immediate usability of the output data by conducting standard analyses of soil microbial diversity. The sequence abundance tables produced byneonMicrobecan be linked to NEON’s other data products (e.g., soil physical and chemical properties, plant community composition) and soil subsamples archived in the NEON Biorepository. We provide recommendations for incorporatingneonMicrobeinto reproducible scientific workflows, discuss technical considerations for large‐scale amplicon sequence analysis, and outline future directions for NEON‐enabled microbial ecology. In particular, we believe that NEON marker gene sequence data will allow researchers to answer outstanding questions about the spatial and temporal dynamics of soil microbial communities while explicitly accounting for scale dependence. We expect that the data produced by NEON and theneonMicrobeR package will act as a valuable ecological baseline to inform and contextualize future experimental and modeling endeavors.more » « less
-
The National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) is gathering select ecological and taxonomic data across 81 sites in the United States and Puerto Rico. Lichens are one of the organismal groups that NEON has not yet assessed across these sites. Here we sampled lichens at Ordway-Swisher Biological Station (OSBS), a NEON site in north central Florida, to provide a baseline survey of the commonly encountered macrolichens (foliose, fruticose, and squamulose lichens). Macrolichens represent a subset of observable lichens and are more commonly surveyed than crustose lichens. Seventy-four species of macrolichens were collected, including 25 occurrences that constitute new records for Putnam County, Florida. The lichen diversity at OSBS comprised approximately 30% of the macrolichen diversity known from the entire state of Florida. Fifty-four taxa are common in the state of Florida, 12 infrequent across the state, and eight are considered rare. Macrolichens were the seventh most species-rich taxonomic groups at OSBS and more diverse than the NEON focal groups of mammals and fish. Lastly, we suggest a theoretical roadmap for how lichenologists could work together with NEON to include lichens in future datasets. We hope that biologists focused on other key organismal groups will sample in NEON sites so that NEON data can be leveraged appropriately in future cross-taxon studies of biodiversity at the continental scale.more » « less
-
Abstract The National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) provides over 180 distinct data products from 81 sites (47 terrestrial and 34 freshwater aquatic sites) within the United States and Puerto Rico. These data products include both field and remote sensing data collected using standardized protocols and sampling schema, with centralized quality assurance and quality control (QA/QC) provided by NEON staff. Such breadth of data creates opportunities for the research community to extend basic and applied research while also extending the impact and reach of NEON data through the creation of derived data products—higher level data products derived by the user community from NEON data. Derived data products are curated, documented, reproducibly‐generated datasets created by applying various processing steps to one or more lower level data products—including interpolation, extrapolation, integration, statistical analysis, modeling, or transformations. Derived data products directly benefit the research community and increase the impact of NEON data by broadening the size and diversity of the user base, decreasing the time and effort needed for working with NEON data, providing primary research foci through the development via the derivation process, and helping users address multidisciplinary questions. Creating derived data products also promotes personal career advancement to those involved through publications, citations, and future grant proposals. However, the creation of derived data products is a nontrivial task. Here we provide an overview of the process of creating derived data products while outlining the advantages, challenges, and major considerations.more » « less
-
Synopsis Human activities are rapidly changing ecosystems around the world. These changes have widespread implications for the preservation of biodiversity, agricultural productivity, prevalence of zoonotic diseases, and sociopolitical conflict. To understand and improve the predictive capacity for these and other biological phenomena, some scientists are now relying on observatory networks, which are often composed of systems of sensors, teams of field researchers, and databases of abiotic and biotic measurements across multiple temporal and spatial scales. One well-known example is NEON, the US-based National Ecological Observatory Network. Although NEON and similar networks have informed studies of population, community, and ecosystem ecology for years, they have been minimally used by organismal biologists. NEON provides organismal biologists, in particular those interested in NEON's focal taxa, with an unprecedented opportunity to study phenomena such as range expansions, disease epidemics, invasive species colonization, macrophysiology, and other biological processes that fundamentally involve organismal variation. Here, we use NEON as an exemplar of the promise of observatory networks for understanding the causes and consequences of morphological, behavioral, molecular, and physiological variation among individual organisms.more » « less
