This project leverages data from the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) to study the impacts of anthropogenic disturbance and climate change on ecological communities across the United States. Terrestrial NEON sites contain annually sampled data on breeding birds, ground beetles, plants and small mammals. This taxa information is supplemented with interaction data from sources such as the Avian MetaNetwork and Global Biotic Interactions (GloBI) to build species interaction networks. Using rasters of land cover change and climate, I am exploring the factors that cause change in interaction networks structure across space and time.
Workflow for network analysis at one terrestrial NEON site: Talladega Forest. Annual species occurrence records are drawn from NEON biodiversity products, and used to create yearly species lists for the site. Interaction data from GloBI and primary literature informs connections between species to create annual interaction networks. The change in networks properties as species are lost and gained is modeled with changes to land cover and climate as explanatory variables.
I plan to link the species interaction networks at terrestrial NEON sites with interaction networks for their co-located aquatic sites to create cross-ecosystem networks. The aquatic networks are being built by SpaCE Lab postdoctoral researcher Minyoung Lee.
Preliminary results for eight forested NEON study sites. Each site is represented by a 15km circle with 2024 NLCD land cover, and a terrestrial species interaction network generated using taxa observed in 2023/24. Network metrics are calculated for each site based on their 2023/2024 structure. This figure was originally featured in a poster presented at the 2026 MSU EEB Symposium.
Cover photo: A flux tower in the trees at the Wind River Experimental Forest (WREF) NEON site in Washington state. Sensors on the tower measure carbon fluxes between the forest and the atmosphere among other data. Credit: Photo courtesy of NEON operated by Battelle.
