 One of the challenges of being a scientist is to think big. Our systems are changing. We need to be able to know how best to manage them, how best to respond. It's an all-hands-on-deck moment in our fields. NEON is envisioned around a number of grand challenges of ecology. These are things like climate change, changes in biogeochemistry, biodiversity, invasive species, and NEON is going to provide one of the most important data sets we can bring to bear to really push the science forward. I got into science because I've always loved maps and I've always been an avid hiker and bicyclist. I grew up in upstate New York and so I spent a lot of time in the Adirondack Mountains as a kid on lakes and hiking. I was kind of a kid who was really a computer nerd, but I was also a Boy Scout. I spent a lot of time in the outdoors of southern New Jersey and the Pine Barrens and on the coastal marshes. I would go out and I would hike or ride new bike routes and I would stop at overlooks and I would look over the forest and at the time there were a number of different things happening like gypsy moth defoliation and I would ask myself what's causing these patterns and you could make a map of this and it'd be really cool to understand what these processes are that are going on that are creating this. But it is really hard to actually collect data that's representative of the whole diversity of ecosystems that you see even within a local region, but certainly when you start to scale up to a national or continental or global scale. That's the scale at which we can really test questions about ecosystem sensitivity to climate and how that changes of latitude with ecosystem type with climatic extremes. So much of ecology is, we found this really interesting ecological pattern that's specific on this elevation gradient or this time of day or this particular El Nino cycle. Field data, they're really expensive and logistically difficult to arrange and collect. That's one of the great things about NEON is that it's collecting field data and other types of information across a widely distributed set of sites that represent the biomes that we have in the U.S. NEON collects fundamental ecological data about biogeochemistry, about the water cycle, about species and biodiversity and the structure of vegetation. They have flux towers that measure gas exchange and gas uptake. Then over these different NEON sites we have these aerial measurements whether it be LIDAR or hyperspectral data that we can use to measure the pulse, the heartbeat and lung capacity of ecosystems. So NEON is enabling the collection of data on spatial and temporal scales that previously were unimaginable for the ecological community. No individual scientist would be able to collect those data on their own across so many different sites. And it's available, it's freely available to everybody in the community. NEON is also a 30-year observatory. It's meant to collect data in these ways for 30 years. There's nothing like that out there. Given that most ecology is done on a three-year grant cycle or a five-year PhD timeline, I think having the ability to answer research questions at a really large geographic scale but to do it over 30 years is going to really change the way we think about some of these questions and some of the answers we thought we understood, but we were only seeing a really small slice in the puzzle. In a three-year study of data collection if you have one anomalous year then you don't really know the state of an ecosystem. This has been a big challenge for ecology. I think a challenge that's always present is funding. We've encountered challenges in especially our long-term monitoring sites. All of those sites have had gaps in their funding which have led to gaps in the data. Many of these sites have gone through multiple principal investigators which means things get handed off, code gets handed over and things often get lost in translation. NEON is providing a vision for ecology. There's something about the shared power of these data which I'm envisioning them as kind of a catalyst for collaboration. One of the great things for me about NEON has been it's actually opened up new collaborations as I've started to work in places that I hadn't previously worked. I'm meeting new people who might be doing different things but they might overlap with what I'm doing. I'm super excited about this idea that we can have the same measurements and the same protocol with uncertainty quantified for every single variable. But making sense of this data still requires what we best do as scientists which is communicate with each other, collaborate with each other, making arguments. Having high quality data like NEON is going to make those arguments crisper, cleaner. We talk about NEON and the possibility of how it'll change the field but I think it's not going to change the ecology. I think it will transform ecology. Data is online. Virtually all the sites are now operational. We're already seeing papers in my journal that are using NEON data and showing interesting results across a gradient of NEON sites. There aren't any other networks like this that collect so much data at so many different places at so many different scales for us to be able to make ecosystems on our planet and what drives them. When it comes to the grand challenges of things like climate change and biodiversity I think NEON is our greatest hope for being able to answer those questions effectively.