KU Field Station NEON - United States of America

The NEON site at the University of Kansas Field Station (UKFS) is a terrestrial field site located approximately 9 km north of Lawrence, KS, along an eastern deciduous forest and tallgrass prairie transition zone. The UKFS site is one of the two relocatable sites that are encompassed in the NEON Prairie Peninsula Domain, which includes the largest remaining areas of unplowed tallgrass prairie in North America. The Prairie Peninsula domain consists of grasslands, forests, and agricultural cover types. The Domain hosts four other NEON field sites, two aquatic and two terrestrial, all of which are located in Kansas. Remote sensing surveys of this field site collect lidar, spectrometer and high-resolution RGB camera data. The flux/meteorological tower at this site is 126’ with 6 measurement levels. The tower top extends above the vegetation canopy to allow sensors mounted at the top and along the tower to capture the full profile of atmospheric conditions from the top of the vegetation canopy to the ground. The tower collects physical and chemical properties of atmosphere-related processes, such as humidity, wind, and net ecosystem gas exchange. Precipitation data are collected by a tipping bucket at the top of the tower and a series of throughfalls located in the soil array. This site has five soil plots placed in an array within the airshed of the flux tower. Field ecologists collect the following types of observational data at this site: Terrestrial organisms (birds, ground beetles, mosquitoes, plants, small mammals, soil microbes, ticks), Biogeochemical data, and soil data.