NEON AOP
NEON Airborne Observatory Platform

The NEON Airborne Observation Platform (AOP) is an airborne remote sensing instrument suite operated by NSF’s National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON). It conducts airborne surveys to collect land cover observations and monitor ecological structure and chemical changes. The NEON AOP includes three instruments: a discrete and full-waveform lidar, an imaging spectrometer, and a high-resolution digital camera. The lidar detects backscatter at 1064 nm to generate three-dimensional maps of topographic features. The imaging spectrometer operates in the visible to near-infrared range (380-2510 nm) to capture images for land cover classification and vegetation analysis. Both the lidar and imaging spectrometer have a spatial resolution of 1 meter. The digital camera captures high-resolution (0.1 m) imagery for contextual information alongside the lidar and hyperspectral imagery.