Find a practical water route across the continent, Thomas Jefferson instructed his modest team of explorers. Learn the names of the nations and their numbers … the animals of the country and especially those not known in the U.S.

Science in service of empire. There was one scientist on the team, Meriwether Lewis, and he was an amateur. Before departure, he boned up on his taxonomy with the leading American botanist of the day.

In the bicentennial year of the Lewis and Clark expedition, Utah State ecologist James MacMahon and his colleagues don't have to work in isolation or in the dark to serve their country. They just have to work lots of nights and weekends to keep up with the planning and paperwork for their winning, groundbreaking National Science Foundation proposal.

The $6-million NSF grant has engaged scientists across the country in the ecological equivalent of our national weather forecasting system. When it's up and running, NEON (the scientists' memorable acronym for the project) will consist of a national network of regional ecological observatories. These observatories will be fed with data collected by satellites, robots and other technological devices that haven't been invented yet. Instead of tracking hurricanes and temperature ranges, these observatories will help scientists investigate the emergence and spread of infectious diseases, the causes and consequences of invasive species, the impact of climate change on our forests and agriculture and a host of other biospheric conditions. Just as the nation's network of meteorological stations allows scientists to predict changes in weather, this network of ecological observatories may make it possible for scientists to predict changes in ecosystems.

Thanks to satellite imagery, scientists can already see things that couldn't be seen before. "When you can see patterns in landscapes created by human development, for instance, you can plan for growth, and predict the availability of water and the loss of farmland and wildlife habitat," says MacMahon, one of the proposal authors. At the microscopic end of the scale, new technologies developed for NEON will "measure things we can't even imagine measuring now."

MacMahon is not the only Utah State professor involved in NEON. USU wildlife scientists, molecular biologists, soil and social scientists, and possibly space scientists and engineers, will participate too. And the collaborating is not limited to research universities. Federal agencies like the National Weather Service and the Bureau of Land Management, non-profits like the Nature Conservancy, and industry scientists and engineers are doing their part as well. (more)