On 23 January 2026, NEON published RELEASE-2026, its annual data release covering 81 field sites across the United States. The release contains 169 data products annotated by 136 DOIs.
At the end of each calendar year, NEON staff conduct a thorough review of data, make any final corrections, and tag data files with a release year and unique DOI to support best practices for citation in publications. DOI URLs always resolve back to the dataset, making them ideal for citing NEON data in research output. These data releases remain stable across all subsystems and accessible (for all subsystems except AOP) throughout the lifetime of the Observatory.
Updated versions of the R and Python neonUtilities packages have been published alongside the data release. Users are advised to use R neonUtilities version 3.0.3 or higher and Python neonutilities version 1.2.1 or higher to access the latest dataset updates.
The release is available through the NEON Data Portal, with details on the Release 2026 webpage.