An inconvenient truth about environmental observatory networks
Environmental observatory networks (EONs) promote collection and dissemination of environmental data along with efforts towards standardization of protocols, data sharing and synthesis activities. Arguably, EONs are the proper structure to address complex, global and socially imperative issues, and value-added products from EONs have been useful for the scientific community and policy makers to assess knowledge gaps and expand the frontiers of ecological understanding. Unfortunately, we cannot measure everywhere within a region or around the world so the spatial distribution of nodes (i.e., study sites) within EONs is limited or biased. This challenge opens the need to evaluate the representativeness of EONs to better interpret their value-added products and syntheses of information. This seminar will discuss evaluation of representativeness of EONs that contribute with information of land-atmosphere water and carbon fluxes across the Americas and the world.