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ARS Home » Plains Area » Fort Collins, Colorado » Center for Agricultural Resources Research » Water Management and Systems Research » Research » Publications at this Location » Publication #412417
Research Project: Improving Resiliency of Semi-Arid Agroecosystems and Watersheds to Change and Disturbance through Data-Driven Research, AI, and Integrated Models

Location: Water Management and Systems Research

Title: neonPlantEcology: An R package for preparing NEON plant data for use in ecological research

Author
item Mahood, Adam
item MACDONALD, JACOB - US Department Of Agriculture (USDA)
item MUTHUKRISHNAN, RANJAN - Boston University
item BARNETT, DAVID - National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON)
item SOKOL, ERIC - National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON)
item 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.