Yellowstone National Park NEON - United States of America

Yellowstone Northern Range (Frog Rock) is a core terrestrial site within NEON's Domain 12: Northern Rockies. Located 100 kilometers southeast of Bozeman, the YELL site is within the northern reaches of Yellowstone National Park. The terrain consists of rolling hills with small wetlands in the bottom of the depressions. The field site is a mosaic of pine-dominated forest mixed with open swaths of sage and grass. This site is also within one of the Park's bear management areas which includes seasonal closure (early March to early June) to minimize bear-human interactions. Remote sensing surveys of this field site collect lidar, spectrometer and high-resolution RGB camera data. The flux/meteorological tower at this site is 59ft with 5 measurement levels.The tower top extends above the vegetation canopy to allow sensors mounted at the top and along the tower to capture the full profile of atmospheric conditions from the top of the vegetation canopy to the ground. The tower collects physical and chemical properties of atmosphere-related processes, such as humidity, wind, and net ecosystem gas exchange. Precipitation data are collected by a tipping bucket at the top of the tower and a series of throughfalls located in the soil array. This site has five soil plots placed in an array within the airshed of the flux tower. Field ecologists collect the following types of observational data at this site: Terrestrial organisms (birds, ground beetles, mosquitoes, plants, small mammals, soil microbes, ticks), Biogeochemical data, and soil data.Total data products planned for this site: 113