NEON ready to build eco collection sites

BOULDER — The federal science lab NEON Inc. plans to start building three ecological collection sites this summer, including the Central Plains Experimental Range in Northern Colorado.

Funding for the Colorado project will come from an anticipated $60 million in fiscal 2012 from the National Science Foundation. In all, NEON, or The National Ecological Observatory Network Inc., plans to build 62 ecological observatory sites across the country – including five in Colorado – with a total of $434 million in funding from the National Science Foundation.

The new Colorado site is expected to cost about $2 million to build – $1 million for site infrastructure and $1 million for sensors and other data items, said Jennifer Walton, a NEON spokeswoman.

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The site near Interstate 25 and the Wyoming border will include a tower, an “instrument hut” with computers, and a wide variety of sensor devices, Walton said. It’s expected to be operating by 2014. Five permanent people are expected to work at the site, and other seasonal workers will be hired as needed, she said.

NEON’s headquarters is in Boulder. It has grown rapidly in recent years and has about 150 employees working at an office at 1685 38th St. NEON gathers climate change data and other data in a project slated to run for at least the next 30 years.

“I am excited to see NEON officially start so we can move from scaling from individual measurements in the field and laboratory studies to generating predictability at large scales,´ said Michael Allen, director of the University of California Center for Conservation Biology and chairman of the Department of Plant Pathology and Microbiology.  “NEON will provide a backbone for many other critical efforts at measuring environmental change.”

The two other observation sites to be built starting this summer will be at Ordway-Swisher Biological Station in Florida and Harvard Forest in Massachusetts.

NEON also plans to start the first test flights of an airborne observing system this year. The lab’s data collection schedules are designed so that the scientific community receives the long-term data to understand environmental change. It was formed in 2007.