Completion of the NEON Cyber Infrastructure Construction-Ready Design

National Ecological Observatory Network, Inc, Boulder CO

Investigators

Abstract

NEON, Inc. is awarded a grant to finalize the cyberinfrastructure component of the final design for the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON). NEON is a continental research platform that will extend our understanding of the biosphere to regional and continental scales. NEON will be a ?shared-use? research platform of field deployed instrumented towers and sensor arrays, sentinel measurements, remote sensing capabilities, natural history archives, and facilities for data analysis, modeling, visualization, and forecasting, all networked onto a cyberinfrastructure backbone. Activities supported under this request are to (1) produce a detailed design as part of the requirements to establish readiness for construction of the NEON facility and (2) test and validate the design components with field implementations of sensors and cyberinfrastructure prototypes. The proposed work will define the parameters required to assure accurate and precise measurements with the goal of gaining a complete, clear, thorough and well-documented understanding of the science requirements as the foundation for developing a comprehensive description of the needs for the CI and operational support architectures. The project will seek to identify and address potential critical issues well before construction to minimize the costs in time and materials associated with any necessity of changing the design during or after the commencement of implementation or operations. The complexity of the relationships between data products, measurements, sensors, and the flow-down from Grand Challenge questions to research requirements will be documented with sophisticated analysis and a high degree of collaboration with NEON scientific staff, the CI team, operations staff as well as external scientific, engineering collaborators and equipment and software vendors.