Deriving best use data from NEON for mosquito research applications: A practical guide with code

Abstract

The National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) is a long-term monitoring program at the continental scale designed to understand and forecast ecological responses to environmental change at local to broad scales. However, despite robust and nearly continuous collections, NEON mosquito data have been underused in downstream analyses. Here, we provide species-level estimated abundances for nighttime collected female mosquitoes derived from the mosquitoes sampled from CO2 traps (DP1.10043.001) (RELEASE-2024; NEON, 2024). By including zero counts, our derived data complement existing data sets and provide an analysis-ready time series useful for investigating mosquito phenology, abundances, and diversity at the species or community level. We also outline a set of considerations specific to filtering NEON mosquito data by sex and for day or nighttime collections, highlighting factors that could introduce uncertainty to abundance estimates. Along with the data set, we provide an R Markdown file that includes annotated code and documents our data filtering and QC/QA steps, as well as data files used to filter the mosquito data based on QC/QA criteria. All files are freely available for download through the Environmental Data Initiative data portal. Our reproducible and fully documented workflow can be easily adapted for specific needs or other NEON surveillance data. Our work aims to enhance the accessibility and use of NEON’s rich, long-term monitoring data.