Location: Water Management and Systems Research
Title: neonPlantEcology: An R package for preparing NEON plant data for use in ecological researchAuthor
![]() |
Mahood, Adam |
![]() |
MACDONALD, JACOB - US Department Of Agriculture (USDA) |
![]() |
MUTHUKRISHNAN, RANJAN - Boston University |
![]() |
BARNETT, DAVID - National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) |
![]() |
SOKOL, ERIC - National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) |
![]() |
SIMKIN, SAM - National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) |
Submitted to: Ecological Modelling
Publication Type: Peer Reviewed Journal Publication Acceptance Date: 5/3/2024 Publication Date: 5/30/2024 Citation: Mahood, A.L., Macdonald, J., Muthukrishnan, R., Barnett, D.T., Sokol, E.R., Simkin, S. 2024. neonPlantEcology: An R package for preparing NEON plant data for use in ecological research. Ecological Modelling. 493. Article e110750. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolmodel.2024.110750. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolmodel.2024.110750 Interpretive Summary: The National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) is a continental-scale endeavor of ecological data collection over 30 years. But the data are quite complex, and if not wrangled carefully, there can be errors, lost time, and invalid results. We created an R package, "neonPlantEcology" that downloads and formats the data correctly into usable structures familiar to plant ecologists. Plant ecologists will be able to use this package to efficiently and correctly acquire and format NEON data for any use case using this package. Technical Abstract: The National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) is a continental-scale endeavor of ecological data collection for 30 years. Because of the complexity, volume,and multiscalar nature of the data, it can be difficult to access and format for typical use cases in plant community ecology. Furthermore, there are idiosyncratic characteristics of the data that, if overlooked, can lead to errors in data processing. We created a software package, ‘neonPlantEcology’, that automatically downloads plant diversity data from neon and formats it to dimensions familiar to plant ecologists. We present three case studies using the package. |