The app opens to a national map of NEON sites across every biome. Tap one to dive into its trees and shrubs. Each site loads instantly from a per-site data bundle that ships with the app (no network round-trip). From there it shows the stand's composition and headline numbers, the size-class distribution and height profile, per-hectare basal area and stem density, diameter growth between remeasurements, every plant as a dot in size-by-height space, the record-holding champions, and a drill-down career card for any single plant. Each site is sized the right way for its habitat: tree diameter at chest height in forests, basal stem diameter in deserts where shrubs are too short to measure that way.
It is built for two audiences: anyone curious about how NEON maps and measures woody plants, and new field technicians getting to know the trees and shrubs at their site.
Select-a-site map · All 42 bundled NEON veg-structure sites (35 forest, 7 shrubland) across every biome, with plot markers sized by basal area. The Harvard Forest demo loads instantly.
Overview · Composition by basal area, an auto-written story of the stand, and its headline numbers, with a clickable hero band that opens ranked details.
Stand Structure · The size-class distribution (a forester's reverse-J for trees, basal classes for shrubs), the height profile, and per-hectare basal area, stem density, and quadratic mean diameter.
Growth and Mortality · Diameter growth rates between remeasurements, the fastest-growing plants, and the live versus standing-dead split.
Size Lab · The flagship: every plant as a dot in size-by-height space (tree diameter or basal width), with tap-to-pin cards, named quadrants that adapt to the site, and export-with-pins.
Champions · The record-holders, biggest, tallest, fastest-growing, and longest-tracked, on a re-sortable leaderboard and podium; tap a row to open its career.
Plant Career · The drill-down for one plant: a shareable card (PNG) plus raw per-visit data (CSV), with its growth trajectory, size-for-species percentile, and quality flags.
Compare two stands · Two sites head to head, plus a full-dataset CSV export with codebook and a one-page stand report PDF.
How we keep it honest
Every chart tells you how its number was measured. We use the latest measurement. For a
plant's current size we use the most recent visit, not an average of past ones, so nothing gets
counted twice. Growth is shown on its own, as the change between visits. We measure each kind of
plant the right way. Trees are measured around the trunk at chest height. Desert shrubs are too
short for that, so they are measured at the base instead (which is what NEON records for almost
every desert plant). The app sorts each site into forest or shrubland and labels everything to
match. We show how much ground the trunks cover, not total weight. Estimating a plant's
weight takes a formula that piles up error, so we leave it out and stick with what is measured
directly. These are estimates from sample plots, not a count of every plant. The numbers are
scaled up from the plots that were measured, with a margin of error shown. Shrinking and lost
plants are kept, not hidden. When a trunk measures smaller than before (bark can flake off,
drought can shrink it), that is checked and kept, and plants that simply lost their tag are counted
separately from plants that died. This is an educational tool. It is not affiliated with
NEON, Battelle, or the NSF.