Dear Colleague Letter: Innovative Use of Scientific Collections (IUSC)
NSF encourages the submission of proposals that foster innovative use of scientific collections and/or associated digital data for novel research, education, and training applications within and across STEM disciplines.
Examples of such proposals include, but are not limited to, those that:
- Propose innovative use of existing biodiversity, living stocks, geological, anthropological, and/or behavioral collections, images and other digital media, and collections-associated data, including to develop or apply new analytical techniques or to answer new scientific questions beyond the original intention of the collections
- Integrate the use of existing collections and collections-associated data in fields that traditionally have made little use of collections
- Create partnerships to use existing collections and collections-associated data in research, training, and education by primarily undergraduate institutions, minority-serving institutions, and other under-resourced institutions
- Make use of biological, genomic, and/or geological samples and specimens collected by the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) from terrestrial and aquatic sites and housed at the NEON Biorepository
- Include as a Broader Impact the use of existing collections to engage students in authentic research experiences
Interested proposers are strongly encouraged to contact a cognizant Program Officer in the relevant NSF program(s).
Dear Colleague Letter: Using Long-Term Research Associated Data (ULTRA-Data)
The goal of this DCL is to stimulate research that makes use of long-term datasets, the participating NSF divisions/offices listed below encourage the submission of proposals that:
- Synthesize, compare, and/or combine long- and short-term datasets to advance understanding of ecosystem and environmental dynamics, ecology, and evolution;
- Conduct new modeling activities, including ecological or environmental forecasting;
- Increase the interoperability of data sets that are available from public repositories/databases such as the Community Surface Dynamics Modeling System (CSDMS), the Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Science (CUAHSI), National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON), Biological & Chemical Oceanography Data Management Office (BCO-DMO), United States Antarctic Program Data Center (USAP-DC), Arctic Data Center, Environmental Data Initiative (EDI), EPA Environmental Dataset Gateway (EDG), Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI), DataONE, and the Paleobiology Database;
- Propose workshops for both researchers and data scientists on accessing and using long-term data sets, with dissemination of the products to the scientific community (e.g., ESIIL).
Principal Investigators should contact program officers in the participating areas of NSF listed above about the suitability of submission to an individual program in response to this DCL, and to discuss the scope and size of potential proposals.