Sample Explorer

Location

NEON samples are physical objects collected or measured and tracked over time. Most samples are collected and held in possession, but some samples remain in the field, such as trees and live mammals. Some samples are discarded after analysis, such as surface water samples, and some samples may be archived, such as beetles.

The Sample Events table displays the location of a sample throughout collection and analysis, as well as a subset of other data related to the sample, such as its condition when received by a facility. If you are interested in requesting an archived sample for your research, this interface can tell you if a given sample was archived, and at what facility.

If your primary interest is in downloadable data for analysis please visit Explore Data Products.

Hierarchy

A sample hierarchy is created when a sample is subsampled, or when multiple samples are pooled, creating child sample(s). Any sample may have parent sample(s) and/or child sample(s). The Sample Hierarchy Graph allows a user to explore these relationships, e.g. to find all the leaf samples (child samples) collected from a given tree (parent sample).

Sample Classes

A sample class is a category of samples. For example, individual mosquitoes indexed during the identification process are a different sample class from pooled mosquitoes sent to the pathogen testing facility. Related samples at different levels in a sample hierarchy have different classes.