The NOAA Coral Reef Conservation Program (CRCP) provides matching grants for international coral reef conservation projects. CRCP solicits proposals that will support the NOAA Coral Reef Conservation Program's International Strategy 2010-2015 (International Strategy). The International Strategy focuses on supporting existing regional efforts in four priority regions based on their interconnections with U.S. reef ecosystems and existing initiatives and partnerships. The following three priority regions will be considered under this Federal Funding Opportunity: the Wider Caribbean, South East Asia and South Pacific, and Micronesia. Funding for the Fiscal Year 2018 competition is subject to the availability of Congressional appropriations and is expected to be approximately $600,000. NOAA expects each applicant will request between $75,000 and $300,000 annually for an award with a project period up to two years. Funding after the first year generally depends on future Congressional appropriations, NOAA/CRCP priorities, and recipient performance in the first year(s) of the award.
The objectives of this Agreement are to improve the resilience of once-forested areas under warming and drying climate by collecting seeds from trees located in BAND that appear to drought-resistant, propagating those seeds, and planting seedlings that are within the natural range of variability for the biophysical setting of BAND, but may be better suited to the warmer drier site; and to conduct research that will inform future restoration projects in post-burned areas. In accordance with Section 4.4.2.2 of MP2006, the genetic type used in these plantings would approximate the extirpated genetic type because all of the seeds will have been collected from within BAND and the seedlings will be planted within the natural range of variability for those species. Replanting would occur on sites severely burned during recent human-caused wildfires in BAND. These fires have burned with uncharacteristic severity, the extent of which is far outside the range of historical variability. Recovery along a natural successional pathway is impeded by the extent of the high-severity patches.
The U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE) Solar Energy Technology Office (SETO) is seeking applications under this Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA) to fund applied research and development to enable the reduction of the levelized cost of electricity (LCOE) generated by concentrating solar power (CSP) to 6 ¢/kWh-electric or less, without subsidies. This FOA intends to develop integrated thermal system solutions to overcome the temperature limitations of current CSP systems, while lowering capital costs by enabling the use of advanced turbines and achieving a higher overall system efficiency in converting solar thermal energy into electricity. Applications to this FOA are expected to advance individual high temperature components which have been developed at lab scale, and test them as an integrated system at a multi-MW thermal scale that can accept solar thermal energy, store it, and efficiently deliver it to a working fluid at high temperature, representative of a high efficiency power cycle.
This Cooperative Agreement is a 5-year project for development and implementation of a Native Water Leasing Pilot Program for the Middle Rio Grande (MRG) to be developed and implemented jointly by the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation (NFWF) and the Bureau of Reclamation (Reclamation) in coordination with the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District (MRGCD). Water acquired under the Program will be used to support implementation of the December 2016 Final Biological Opinion for Bureau of Reclamation, Bureau of Indian Affairs, and Non-Federal Water Management and Maintenance Activities on the Middle Rio Grande, New Mexico (2016 BiOp). The primary focus of the Cooperative Agreement is to develop and implement the cooperative pilot Program with MRGCD and willing sellers over a 5-year implementation period to acquire water for environmental use in the MRG. Through pilot implementation, the Program will set the stage for expanded native water leasing and other voluntary measures at scale as win-win solutions for the river, local communities, agricultural producers, and MRGCD over the long term. Further, it provides a key component of a large-scale long-term opportunity to combine instream water leasing with the restoration of riparian and upper watershed habitats along with other initiatives to advance landscape-scale restoration in the MRG. Areas where collaboration with other agencies and partner organizations will broaden the scope of the effort, leverage additional funding, and increase the prospects for long-term success will be identified throughout the effort.
This program seeks to enhance and expand the national resource of digital data documenting existing vouchered biological and paleontological collections and to advance scientific knowledge by improving access to digitized information (including images) residing in vouchered scientific collections across the United States. The information associated with various collections of organisms, such as geographic, paleogeographic and stratigraphic distribution, environmental habitat data, phenology, information about associated organisms, collector field notes, and tissues and molecular data extracted from the specimens, is a rich resource providing the baseline from which to further biodiversity research and provide critical information about existing gaps in our knowledge of life on earth.
The proposed research must be organized around a suite of compelling questions that deepen understanding of ecological processes and require uninterrupted, long-term collection, analysis, and interpretation of environmental data. LTER research should be developed around a conceptual framework that motivates questions requiring experiments and observations over long time frames. The conceptual framework should explicitly justify the long-term question(s) posited by the research and it should identify how data in LTER core areas and any experimental work contribute to an understanding of the question(s) while testing major ecological theories or concepts. The framework should provide the justification for all studies outlined in the proposal; ideally, it should be informed by analyses of existing long term data. Proposed research should have the goals of achieving a mechanistic understanding of biological responses to past and present environmental change at multiple scales and of using this understanding to predict ecological responses at population, community, and ecosystem levels and social responses to environmental change. Consideration of evolutionary processes is encouraged.
The Plant Genome Research Program (PGRP) supports genome-scale research that addresses challenging questions of biological, societal and economic importance. PGRP encourages the development of innovative tools, technologies and resources that empower a broad plant research community to answer scientific questions on a genome-wide scale. Emphasis is placed on the scale and depth of the question being addressed and the creativity of the approach. Data produced by plant genomics should be usable, accessible, integrated across scales and of high impact across biology. Training, broadening participation, and career development are essential to scientific progress and should be integrated in all PGRP-funded projects.
Two funding tracks are currently available:
RESEARCH-PGR TRACK: Genome-scale plant research to address fundamental questions in biology, including processes of economic and/or societal importance.
TRTech-PGR TRACK: Tools, resources and technology breakthroughs that further enable functional plant genomics.
The Division of Integrative Organismal Systems (IOS) Core Programs support research aimed at understanding why organisms are structured the way they are and function as they do. Proposals are welcomed in all of the core scientific program areas supported by the Division of Integrative Organismal Systems (IOS). Areas of inquiry include, but are not limited to, developmental biology and the evolution of developmental processes, nervous system development, structure, modification, function, and evolution; biomechanics and functional morphology, physiological processes, symbioses and microbial interactions, interactions of organisms with biotic and abiotic environments, plant and animal genomics, and animal behavior. Proposals should focus on organisms as a fundamental unit of biological organization. Principal Investigators are encouraged to apply systems approaches that will lead to conceptual and theoretical insights and predictions about emergent organismal properties.
NSF solicits proposals to manage the operations and maintenance of the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON), an NSF-funded major facility project. NEON comprises terrestrial, aquatic, atmospheric, and remote sensing measurement infrastructure and cyberinfrastructure that deliver standardized, calibrated data to the scientific community through a single, openly accessible data portal. NEON infrastructure is geographically distributed across the United States, including Alaska, Hawaii and Puerto Rico, and will generate data for ecological research over a 30-year period. NEON is designed to enable the research community to ask and address their own questions on a regional to continental scale around the environmental challenges identified as relevant to understanding the effects of climate change, land-use change and invasive species patterns on the biosphere. The NSF NEON program, which is part of the Centers and Cooperative Agreements Cluster in the Division of Biological Infrastructure, manages the NEON award in collaboration with the NSF Large Facilities Office and the NSF Division of Acquisition and Cooperative Support.
The NSF ADVANCE program provides grants to enhance the systemic factors that support equity and inclusion and to mitigate the systemic factors that create inequities in the academic profession and workplaces. Systemic (or organizational) inequities may exist in areas such as policy and practice as well as in organizational culture and climate. For example, practices in academic departments that result in the inequitable allocation of service or teaching assignments may impede research productivity, delay advancement, and create a culture of differential treatment and rewards. Similarly, policies and procedures that do not mitigate implicit bias in hiring, tenure, and promotion decisions could lead to women and racial and ethnic minorities being evaluated less favorably, perpetuating historical under-participation in STEM academic careers and contributing to an academic climate that is not inclusive.
All NSF ADVANCE proposals are expected to use intersectional approaches in the design of systemic change strategies in recognition that gender, race and ethnicity do not exist in isolation from each other and from other categories of social identity. The solicitation includes four funding tracks: Institutional Transformation (IT), Adaptation, Partnership, and Catalyst, in support of the NSF ADVANCE program goal to broaden the implementation of systemic strategies that promote equity for STEM faculty in academic workplaces and the academic profession.
NOTE: Webpage provides information about general webinar and BIO Directorate breakout. If you are interested in breakouts for other directorates, contact Heather Johnston (johnsthb@MiamiOH.edu) in Research & Innovation for information.
On Wednesday, November 4, 2020 and Thursday, November 5, 2020, NSF will host outreach webinars with information about the Mid-Scale Research Infrastructure (Mid-scale RI)-1 funding opportunity (NSF 21-505).
The Mid-scale RI Big Idea is intended to provides an agile, Foundation-wide process to fund experimental research capabilities in the mid-scale range ($6 million to $100 million), between the Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) and Major Facilities thresholds. Recently, the solicitation (NSF 21-505) for the Mid-scale RI-1 program (for infrastructure with total project cost of $6 million up until, but not including, $20 million) was published with a deadline of January 7, 2021 for preliminary proposals.
Each session will begin at 1:00 p.m. EST and have two parts: a general Mid-scale RI-1 information session (1:00 p.m. -1:40 p.m. EST) with Q&A followed by Directorate-specific breakouts (1:45 p.m. - 2:30 p.m. EST) where more technical questions will be addressed. The information presented on Day 1 will be the same as the information presented on Day 2.
