Desert Data Labs
The NEON Explorer Suite · Consumers

NEON Ground Beetle Tracker

A Shiny web app for exploring the National Ecological Observatory Network's ground beetle (Carabidae) data, caught in cup traps sunk in the soil. It turns real records from 46 field sites, prairie to forest to desert, into community rankings, diversity profiles, seasonal activity, multi-year trends, and a map of who lives where, with every count expressed as catch per 100 trap-nights so sites and seasons compare fairly. Ground beetles react fast to habitat and climate, which makes them a handy gauge of a site's health.

Launch the Ground Beetle Tracker View on GitHub
Ground Beetleslaunch → Driver Cascade Small Mammals Birds Plant Diversity Plant Phenology Veg Structure Water Chemistry Mosquitoes Little Inverts
What it does

The app opens to a national map of NEON sites. Pick one and it loads instantly from a per-site data bundle that ships with the app (no network round-trip), with the date window snapped to that site's real coverage. From there it ranks the community by abundance, profiles diversity, charts seasonal activity and multi-year trends, places every site in community space, and names each site's signature beetles. Tap a map marker to jump there, choose a second site to compare a prairie next to a forest, or hit Surprise me for a random site.

It is built for two audiences: anyone curious about how NEON samples ground beetles, and new field technicians getting to know the carabids at their site.

Highlights

Overview · The carabid community ranked by abundance and catch per 100 trap-nights, plus "meet the beetles" natural-history cards.
Diversity · Hill numbers (q0/q1/q2 effective species), Hurlbert rarefaction at equal sample size, and species accumulation across bouts.
Seasonality · Activity-density by month (catch per 100 trap-nights), overall or split by the top species to reveal each one's peak.
Trends · Inter-annual catch-per-effort with a fitted trend line and a plain-English verdict (rising, declining, or flat, with %/yr and p-value).
Biogeography · A national map sized by richness or a chosen species' abundance, a Bray-Curtis community ordination, and an indicator-species table naming each site's signature beetles.
Compare two sites · Overlay any second site on the Diversity and Seasonality charts to read one place against another.
46
NEON sites
~233k
beetles trapped
731
species
every year
same way, same spots
How it stays honest
Some sites are trapped harder than others, so a raw count would mislead. We report catch per 100 trap-nights instead, which puts every site on the same footing and also smooths over changes NEON made to its own setup (fewer traps per plot in 2018, fewer plots per site in 2023). When we count how many kinds live at a site, we use only beetles named all the way down to their species. Beetles that could only be sorted to a broader group are set aside so they don't make a site look more varied than it is, though the total beetle count still includes every one caught. The diversity and map math use standard ecology methods (Hill numbers, rarefaction, a community ordination, and an indicator-species test), and trend lines stay quiet until a site has about five years of record. Everything loads from data we bundle ahead of time, rather than from a live server. This is an educational tool for exploring data. It is not affiliated with NEON, Battelle, or the NSF.