Harvard Forest Nominated as Core Site for NEON

The National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON, Inc.) announced a group of 20 candidate Core Sites across the United States that will be included in the NEON Project Execution Plan. Harvard Forest was identified as the core site for the Northeastern Domain. The NEON Core Sites will be in wildlands (i.e, largely natural vegetation, not intensively managed) and will form the stable, fixed elements of the design, which also includes relocatable gradient sites and mobile (truck mounted) laboratories. The Core Sites will be in place for 30 or more years, have extensive sampling and instrumentation, and serve as a base for staff operating the site and associated gradient and mobile laboratories. The Core Site backbone hopes to observe national-scale impacts of highly "connected" phenomena across the entire country. Examples include impacts of invasion or disease, climate change, large-scale modes of variability such as El Niño, and large-scale transport phenomena, such as inputs of Asiatic dust and pollution.