This week, we were introduced to the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON). NEON is a federal government organization that collects mass amounts of ecological data from across the country. All of the data that NEON gathers is public, so that any research groups that wish to utilize it have free access.
Essentially NEON is the ecological equivalent of NASA. And until this week, I didn’t even know it existed. NEON executes long-term monitoring projects on a range of biotic and abiotic factors, including atmosphere, soil, and a variety of taxa. After we were introduced to the program, one of their field mammalogists briefed us on their small mammal sampling protocols, so that we could assist them the next morning.
The next morning, we were up bright-and-early to check some mammal traps! We broke up into groups and went with the field team to a few sampling plots. The first plot my group visited was a recently mown hay field. There was grid of 100 Sherman traps set throughout the field. We checked every single trap, but no success. Slightly disappointed, I was reassured when I found out that they had never caught a single animal in that plot before. It was used as a sort of control to compare against the forest habitat that we were headed to next.
In the next plot we had somewhere around a dozen captures, all of them white-footed mice (Peromyscus lecuopus). The field team diligently powered through each individual, tagging, recording, and sampling. Many of them were recaptures, indicated by an ear tag. Needless to say, the recaptures were much less disturbed by the whole process than the newbies.
To our dismay, a couple of the mice were in really bad shape. Some of the traps had been mistakenly set without the insulation that mice use to stay warm until morning. Immediately upon discovering this, the crew hurried the imperiled critters back to the vehicle where there were two huge crates packed with supplies. In one of the crates was a rescue kit with everything needed to get them stabilized. They were warmed back up and released without invasive sampling to save them any more stress.
It was a pretty crazy experience, but it reaffirmed my desire to one day be a field ecologist. The samples collected from this project are being used to monitor disease spread and population size of small mammals throughout the region. Getting to see real fieldwork being done was a new experience for me. I learned that things don’t always go your way, so you have to prepare for the worst.