Last year, Michael SanClements, an ecologist affiliated with the Institute of Arctic & Alpine Research at the University of Colorado, sent a Dot Earth “Postcard” about a project studying soil microbes in Antarctica. Here’s a fresh contribution from SanClements, along with colleague Jeff Taylor, from the other end of the planet — Alaska’s Arctic tundra.

They are both staff scientists with the National Ecological Observatory Network, an initiative supported by the National Science Foundation that has a goal of creating a view of ecological change that spans the continent over the next three decades. As they explain below, without consistent monitoring, it’s hard to gauge the scope and causes of changes in environmental conditions:

Some ecosystems provide economic and social benefits at the local level. Others exist far from our cities in inconceivably large landscapes and have the ability to influence processes at the global scale. The tundra is such a place — remote, vast and home to enormous stores of frozen carbon which play a critical role in our climate’s future. Earlier this fall, we visited the tundra as part of a massive new project which will monitor ecological change across all of the continent’s major ecosystems.

Toolik Field Station — 158 miles north of the Arctic Circle in Alaska. It’s dusk and we’ve just arrived. Thom Walker, the assistant camp manager, has been kind enough to save us some dinner. From the windows in the cafeteria, we can see ptarmigan, white against the brown of the tundra. And in the distance, more white — the snow-covered Brooks Range rising to meet an enormous autumn moon. A beautiful landscape, and one we consider ourselves lucky to spend time in.

Michael D. SanClementsMoonrise over the Brooks Range, as seen from the Toolik Field Station on the North Slope of Alaska.

We’re here because we need to prepare a temporary meteorological station to survive the long dark winter. Built in June by Dr. Henry Loescher, the tower, located high on a ridge overlooking the Trans-Alaska Pipeline and Dalton Highway, is collecting data on prevailing wind directions and annual temperature variations that are crucial for the design and construction of a National Ecological Observatory Network research site. Eventually, a tower will be built here that will measure not just meteorological data, but a suite of observations related to solar radiation, greenhouse gases, pollutants, the terrestrial carbon cycle and soil.

With six such sites planned in Alaska, and 60 total in the United Sates, this network, best known under the acronym NEON, is the world’s first continental scale ecological observatory. Over the next 30 years, these sites will collect hundreds of terabytes of ecological data annually to help understand the impacts of climate change, land-use change and invasive species on natural resources and biodiversity.

The Toolik Field Station and tower site are extremely remote. We flew into Deadhorse, or Prudhoe Bay as it’s often called. It’s not so much a town as a rugged industrial work camp situated near the frigid Arctic Ocean at the far end of the pipeline; it exists mainly to facilitate the extraction and pumping of oil. From there, you head south on the Dalton highway, the lone road, for hundreds of miles. After three bumpy, sometimes scary and always beautiful hours you’ll find Toolik Field Station. Situated on the north side of the Brooks Range and the shores of Toolik Lake, the station supports hundreds of scientists each year as they study the changing Arctic.

In this era of rapid environmental change driven by the pressures of expanding human population and a changing climate, long-term ecological research is more important than ever. Short-term data sets are like snapshots of the environment at a single point in time. They lack the temporal context to effectively answer questions about the trajectory and causes of environmental change.

Initiatives like NEON and the Long Term Ecological Research Network aim to help us to track and understand the effects of human activities on ecosystems that provide valuable services to society. It may not be as sexy as the Mars Curiosity Rover or a big field campaign to an exotic place, but sustained, long-term observations are essential to answering many scientific questions and may one day be used by future generations to answer questions that haven’t been asked yet.