IEEE Spectrum - North American - March 2015 - 60

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MaR 2015

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SPECTRUM.IEEE.ORG

Senior investigator Boose hopes this trend will lead to a new
kind of prediction. "We've gotten pretty good at forecasting
the weather, but no one's ever really been able to do ecological forecasting," he says. "To do any sort of prediction, you
need access to data quickly. New wireless techniques give
us the potential to pull this all together and calculate water
budgets that are right up-to-date."
ev en iF h a rva r d succeeds in predicting the behavior
of its own forest, questions remain about how that success
might apply elsewhere. So far, ecological experimentation
has been of just two kinds: hyperlocal but richly detailed,
such as John O'Keefe's painstaking observations of the first
spring buds in the Harvard Forest, or global in scope but
thinly observed, such as satellite data of the same phenomenon. To fill the gap between these extremes, another tower
was put into service in Petersham last summer. Although it
carries many of the same meteorological and atmospheric
instruments as Harvard's other structures, it is just one of 60
identical towers that will rise in every ecoclimatic domain of
the United States, from Alaska's tundra to Hawaii's beaches.
Every site in the National Ecological Observatory Network
(NEON) will measure the same things, in the same way, at
the same time, for the next 30 years.
"When you integrate studies from different investigators,
using different techniques, you get a large error band," says
Elizabeth Blood, NEON's program director at the National Science Foundation. "With NEON, we'll reduce the error bands so
we can begin to see patterns and interconnections that weren't
visible before." The data from NEON's continent-spanning towers, as well as its three airborne observatories, 46 aquatic sites,
and thousands of citizen scientists, will quickly be made available online.
"We want to develop a forecasting capability just like the
weather service," says Blood. "NEON will help us reduce the
noise in the data and give us the ability to make predictions in
both the near and longer terms." Richardson's group is working with NEON to start the first citizen-science program. The
effort will make use of the Zooniverse website, which recruits
volunteers to work as scientists' helpers. Users will check the
network of minicams for features that often elude conventional computer-vision systems, such as signs of flowering or
snow on the ground. The $450 million NEON project should
be fully operational by 2017, just in time to share data and
insights with networked forests in Australia, Brazil, Canada,
Costa Rica, Singapore, and the United Kingdom.
Climate change, of course, is a global issue. At the moment,
these big-budget efforts are largely confined to the richer
countries. "There are still large parts of the world we don't
know that much about," admits Richardson.
But mighty forests from little acorns grow. One day, the tools
being pioneered in this small New England forest might help
realize a global ecological prediction network, one in which
everything is connected to everything else. ▲ ▲ ▲
post your comments at http://spectrum.ieee.org/
harvardtrees0315

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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Spectrum - North American - March 2015