Current Status and Future Plans of the NEON Airborne Observation Platform (AOP): Data Products, Observatory Requirements and Opportunities for the Community

The National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) is a continental-scale ecological observation platform designed to collect and disseminate data that contributes to understanding and forecasting the impacts of climate change, land use change, and invasive species on ecology. NEON will collect in-situ and airborne data over 81 sites across the US, including Alaska, Hawaii, and Puerto Rico. The Airborne Observation Platform (AOP) group within the NEON project operates a payload suite that includes a waveform LiDAR, imaging spectrometer (NIS) and high resolution RGB camera. Data from this sensor suite will be collected annually over each site and processed into a set of standard data products, generally following the processing levels used by NASA (Level 1 through Level 3). We will present a summary of the first operational flight campaign (2016), where AOP flew 42 of the 81 planned NEON sites, our operational plans for 2017, and how we will ramp up to full operations by 2018. We will also describe the final set of AOP data products to be delivered as part of NEON construction and those field (observational) data products collected concurrently on the ground, that may be used to support validation efforts of algorithms for deriving vegetation characteristics from airborne data (e.g. Plant foliar physical/chemical properties, Digital Hemispherical Photos, Plant Diversity, etc.). Opportunities for future enhancements to data products or algorithms will be facilitated via NEON's cyberinfrastructure, which is designed to support wrapping/integration of externally-developed code. And finally, we will present NEON's plans for the third AOP Sensor Suite as an assignable asset and the intent of NSF to provide research opportunities to the community for developing higher level AOP data products that were removed from the NEON project in 2015.