Desert Data Labs
The NEON Explorer Suite

NEON Driver Cascade

Does a wetter year grow more plants, and do more plants mean more animals a year later? NEON is a network of research sites across the United States, funded by the National Science Foundation, that measures plants, animals, water, and climate the same way everywhere, year after year. This tool lines up the climate, plant, and animal records at each site so you can see how they connect, and it tests those links honestly, showing where the chain holds and where it does not. Pick a site to see its records.

Launch the Driver Cascade View on GitHub
Driver Cascadelaunch → Small Mammals Birds Ground Beetles Plant Diversity Plant Phenology Veg Structure Water Chemistry Mosquitoes Little Inverts
What this shows you

The weather feeds the plants. The plants feed the animals.

Energy moves up from the ground in four steps. This tool lines those steps up at each site so you can see them in order, and it shows the statistics at every link so you know how strong each one really is.

Climate · rain and temperature
Green-up · when leaves come out in spring
Plants · how much grows: cover, trees, variety
Animals · the mice, birds, and beetles that eat them
8
apps in the suite
46
NEON sites
open
public NEON data
4
layers of life lined up
How it stays honest
A few years of data can look like a pattern by pure luck, so this tool is careful about what it claims. It writes down what it expects to find before it looks (warmer springs should mean earlier leaves, for example), it stays quiet when a site has too few years to say anything, and it counts how many links point the way they were predicted to instead of cherry-picking the one that fits. It never says one thing "causes" another, because you cannot prove cause from a handful of yearly readings. The data is real, already measured at each site, and you can click and download it. These are educational tools for exploring open data. They are not affiliated with NEON, Battelle, or the NSF.