NEON Data Skills Demo: Exploring the Water Cycle at Co-Located Terrestrial-Aquatic Sites

This tutorial explores hydrologic data products published by NEON across observational, instrumented, and remote sensing subsystems. It focuses on downloading and exploring various NEON hydrologic data products. It also dives deeper into NEON hydrology data, using co-located terrestrial-aquatic sites to examine the water cycle at multiple levels. In this tutorial, we will focus on water year 2024 data (2023-10-01 - 2024-09-30) at one pair of co-located NEON sites from Domain 07 - Appalachians & Cumberland Plateau: Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL - terrestrial) and Walker Branch (WALK - aquatic). The code for this tutorial is available in both Python and R environments. After completing this activity, you will be able to: 1) download and explore the contents of NEON hydrologic data products from the observational and instrumented subsystems; 2) navigate to tools and data sources for more derived data products such as geospatial data, bundled eddy-covariance data, or data from the airborne observation platform; 3) understand the similarities and linkages between different NEON data products; 4) join and plot hydrologic data sets from the instrumented subsystem across a terrestrial-aquatic gradient at NEON co-located sites.