The National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) is a national-scale research platform for assessing the impacts of climate change, land-use change, and invasive species on ecosystem structure and function. NEON partitions the United States into 20 ecoclimate domains. Each domain hosts fully instrumented aquatic sites in permanent (wildland area) and relocatable sites (36 sites in current definition). Relocatable sites aims to capture ecologically significant contrasts within and between domains. At each site the same field collection methods and instruments shall be used to record and archive ecological data for at least 30 years.

At each site, NEON will support a large suite of aquatic and terrestrial sensor arrays and measurements to provide data on biogeochemistry, surface and groundwater discharge, stream and lake morphology, and air quality. The observatory will track patterns in aquatic plants and algae, microbes, invertebrates, and fish or other top predators. Data will be gathered from the level of gene to ecosystem at a local to continental scale.

NEON enables multi-factorial experiments which accelerate predicted environmental change. The STReam Experimental Observatory Network (STREON) is a long-term, large-scale field experiment that will quantify how nutrient enrichment and reduced consumer diversity influence the ecosystem biodiversity, biogeochemistry (including nutrient uptake rates), ecohydrology, and production (e.g. whole stream metabolism).