A continental network to monitor how we're trashing the environment

In some ways it's silly to draw a line between people and nature. People are a part of nature, naturally. But it would also be silly to discount the fact that people have had a negative impact on nature – from over-use of natural resources to insensitive land development patterns to widespread pollution and contamination. We know we can be a problem. Now, in a new continental-scale, 30-year science effort, we're trying to keep an eye on just how badly we're screwing things up.

Ground has just broken on this new effort, the National Ecological Observatory Network, or NEON, which will literally blanket the entire United States with dozens of monitoring stations to document how different ecosystems change as a result of climate change and differing land use patterns – essentially the kinds of environmental problems we can trace back to ourselves.

The NEON website explains:

To help us understand how we can maintain our quality of life on this planet, we must develop a more holistic understanding of how biosphere services and products are interlinked with human impacts. This cannot be investigated using disconnected studies on individual sites or over short periods of observation. Further, existing monitoring programs that collect data to meet natural resource management objectives are not designed to address climate change and other new, complex environmental challenges.

The data collection will be standardized across 20 different eco-climatic domains, or ecosystems, and will be collected on a continuous basis for the next 30 years. With this massive, easily comparable set of data, NEON will be one observatory to rule them all. 

Read more at The Atlantic Cities.