NEON research cameras in Puerto Rico

NEON, the National Ecological Observatory Network, is a continental-scale observatory of the United States, funded entirely by the National Science Foundation and operated by Battelle. It has 81 field sites, designed to collect the same kinds of data for thirty years or more so that changes in ecosystems can be measured. It divides the country into twenty ecoclimatic domains; Puerto Rico belongs to Domain 04, the Atlantic Neotropical.

Three of its Puerto Rican sites appear on this site: the tower in the Guánica Dry Forest, the main land site of the domain; the grassland of the Lajas Valley, on land of the farm station that the University of Puerto Rico runs there; and the Río Yahuecas near Adjuntas, a stream site that NEON used to call Río Guilarte. Each has a PhenoCam, a camera that takes a color and an infrared picture every 15 minutes to record the timing of leaves, grasses and water.

NEON follows the standards of the PhenoCam network, which processes its images and publishes the latest one from each camera; that is the picture this site shows, renewed every 15 minutes. These are research cameras, so they are pointed at vegetation rather than at views, and they change with the seasons rather than by the minute.