The Biodiversity on a Changing Planet program is a new cross-directorate and international program led by NSF that invites submission of interdisciplinary proposals addressing grand challenges in biodiversity science within the context of unprecedented environmental change. The program supports a comprehensive and integrative approach to understanding planetary biodiversity from a functional perspective, and it encourages the use of new technology and team science approaches. Research supported by this program will improve modeling and forecasting of the consequences of functional change in biodiversity in response to environmental change. BoCP builds on and expands the former Dimensions of Biodiversity program and incorporates elements of the Bridging Ecology and Evolution (BEE) track in the Division of Environmental Biology. 

There are two proposal tracks covered by this solicitation (NSF 22-508): Design and Implementation. Design proposals are aimed at building new teams with no prior collaborative track record to develop creative research and technical approaches to address the functional axes of biodiversity. Implementation proposals are suitable for collaborative teams at a more developed research stage, ready to implement a large-scale project addressing functional biodiversity on a changing planet. 

Successful BoCP proposals will test hypotheses about functional biodiversity on a changing planet by integrating cellular, organismal, ecological, evolutionary, geological, and/or paleontological perspectives. 

The program supports both US-only collaborative proposals and proposals with international partnerships with the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC), the São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP) of Brazil, and the National Research Foundation (NRF) of South Africa. These agreements do not preclude other international collaborations. 

The proposal deadline is March 25, 2022.   

For more information and answers to questions about the program, please register for the upcoming Virtual Office Hour on Monday, November 8 from 1:00 PM to 2:00 PM Eastern time. 

If you are interested in research related to the effects of climate change but don’t feel the BoCP solicitation is the correct one for your work, there are many programs at NSF that support research on the effects of climate change. One additional new NSF program that focuses on the biological response to climate change is Organismal Response to Climate Change (ORCC). You can also search “climate change” on the new NSF funding search tool.

For further inquiries, please contact members of the BoCP working group: biodiversity@nsf.gov.