Desert Data Labs
The NEON Explorer Suite · Aquatic Invertebrates

NEON My Little Inverts

A Shiny web app for exploring the National Ecological Observatory Network's aquatic macroinvertebrate data. NEON is a network of research sites across the United States that measures the same things the same way at every site, every year. This app turns the bottom-of-the-stream animal collections at 34 aquatic sites, from desert streams to arctic lakes, into community profiles, taxa boards, and per-taxon cards. It reads density as an honest within-site index, individuals per square metre, not a population count, and leads with EPT, the mayflies, stoneflies, and caddisflies that need clean, well-oxygenated water.

Open My Little Inverts View on GitHub
My Little Invertslaunch → Driver Cascade Small Mammals Ground Beetles Plant Diversity Plant Phenology Veg Structure Water Chemistry Birds Mosquito Pulse
What it does

The app opens to a national map of NEON aquatic sites coloured by water type. Tap one to read its bottom-dwelling community, or step back and compare the whole network across a gradient. Each site loads instantly from a per-site data bundle that ships with the app, with no network round-trip. From there it ranks the densest taxa, estimates how many kinds really live there, plots every taxon by how dense and how widespread it is, and traces the clean-water signal over time.

It is built for two audiences: anyone curious about what lives on a stream or lake bottom and what it says about the water, and the field crews and students who want a fast, honest read on a NEON aquatic site.

Highlights

Select-a-site map · A national map of all 34 bundled aquatic sites, coloured by water type (stream, river, lake), with a one-tap load and an accessible list fallback. The demo opens Sycamore Creek, a Sonoran-desert stream near Phoenix.
Taxa Board · Every taxon as a dot: how dense it is (individuals per square metre) against how widespread it is (the share of samples it shows up on). EPT taxa, the clean-water groups, are called out. Tap any dot to pin its card.
The EPT pulse · The clean-water signal over time: each collection bout's share of mayflies, stoneflies, and caddisflies, alongside density, with the habitat and sampler type carried so you can read what is biology and what is method.
Across the country · Every aquatic site placed on a geographic gradient against its community, coloured by water type. Lakes sit naturally low on the clean-water bugs, which the chart shows plainly. Space-for-time, stated on the chart.
Honest abundance: a density index · Density is individuals per square metre, a within-site index, never a population. Big samples are subsampled and scaled up, so the number is an estimate, and the app says so on every chart.
Diversity, beyond one sample · Richness rarefied to a common count plus a Chao1 estimate of how many kinds really use the site, since sampling misses the rare and the patchy. Suppressed where the count is too small to be honest.
Taxon profile cards · A downloadable card (PNG + CSV) for any taxon: density, how widespread, whether it is EPT, plus clickable site data-quality flags you can download, with a column codebook.
34
aquatic sites
stream / river / lake
three water types
EPT
the clean-water bugs
per m²
density, not a count
How we keep it honest
Every chart says how its number was made. When we show how abundant a taxon is, that is a density (individuals per square metre), not a population, because a benthic sample covers a known patch of bottom and is then scaled up from the fraction NEON sorted. Comparisons are valid within one site, within a habitat and a sampler type; different samplers and habitats are not directly comparable. Counts of how many kinds live at a site are standardized so a bigger sample is not credited with extra taxa just for being bigger, and they are suppressed where the count is too small to estimate honestly. The EPT share, the mayflies, stoneflies, and caddisflies, is a descriptive clean-water signal, never a pass/fail score, a good/fair/poor rating, or an aquatic-life-use call: NEON sites have no calibrated reference condition. Lakes are naturally EPT-poor, so a low share at a lake is the ecosystem, not impairment. When we compare sites across the country, we are comparing 34 different places watched at the same time, not one place changing, so the patterns are a starting point for questions, not proof of cause. This is a tool for learning and exploring. It is not affiliated with NEON, Battelle, or the NSF.