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.

Check out the latest post from our Office of the Assistant Director here or read the full post below:

“NSF has released a new solicitation for a Center for Advancement and Synthesis of Open Environmental Data and Sciences (NSF 21-549). Letters of Intent for the solicitation are due on April 1, 2021

Exemplifying open and team science, the Center will be fueled by open and freely available biological and other environmental data to catalyze novel scientific questions in environmental biology through the use of data-intensive approaches, research networks, and training in the accession, management, analysis, visualization, and synthesis of large data sets.

The Center will provide vision for speeding discovery through the increased use of large, publicly accessible datasets – such as those provided by the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON), Integrated Digitized Biocollections (iDigBio), the LTER network, Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), and others – to address biological research questions through collaborations with scientists in other related disciplines, as well as key questions that emerge at interfaces between biology, informatics, and a breadth of environmental sciences.

It also will foster the development of generalizable cyberinfrastructure solutions and community-driven standards for software, data, and metadata that support open and team science, and role-modeling best practices.

The Center will be a leader in diversifying the data-intensive environmental science workforce across demographic, geographic, institutional, and disciplinary dimensions and will further enable data-driven discovery through immersive education and training experiences to provide the advanced skills needed to maximize the scientific potential of large volumes of available open data.

For more information on the solicitation, including a list of cognizant Program Officers, please visit the program page: https://www.nsf.gov/funding/pgm_summ.jsp?pims_id=505829&org=NSF&sel_org=NSF&from=fund.”

credit: NSF

Join the Interagency Arctic Research Policy Committee (IARPC) and the National Science Foundation for a webinar introducing the latest Navigating the New Arctic (NNA) Solicitation (NSF 21-524) on January 15, 2-3pm EST. NNA seeks innovations in fundamental convergence research across the social, natural, environmental, computing and information sciences, and engineering that addresses the interactions or connections among natural and built environments and social systems, and how these connections inform our understanding of Arctic change and its local and global effects.

Program Officers will highlight major changes from the previous solicitation, review goals of the Navigating the New Arctic program, and be available for a Q&A session. This webinar will be recorded.

Learn more and register: https://www.iarpccollaborations.org/events/20256

Visit the program page for more information, view the latest solicitation here and FAQs for the solicitation here.

To promote integration across biological subdisciplines, the Directorate for Biological Sciences (BIO) has released a revised solicitation (NSF 20-601) under the Biology Integration Institutes (BII) program.

The program, launched this year, supports collaborative teams investigating questions that span multiple disciplines within and beyond biology. BII is interested in research that informs our understanding of biological processes and mechanisms across and within organizational scales – from molecules to global scales.

Each Institute must identify a Research Theme, centered around a compelling and broad biological question poised for breakthroughs by collaboration across biological subdisciplines. The Theme must be larger in scope than research projects typically submitted to core programs in the BIO Directorate. While the proposed project does not have to span all biological subdisciplines (that would be a lot), it should span more than one subdiscipline and be compelling across the subdisciplines spanned. These efforts are funded with an initial commitment of 5 years and the possibility of a 5-year continuation.

Proposals are due by January 13, 2021. Revisions include the elimination of the “Design” track and the elimination of the Letter of Intent (just apply!).

Visit here to learn more about what was recently funded and if you have specific questions, please reach out to one of the Program Officers listed on the program page.

Our friends in DBI shared a post about the PRFB that you can read here or in full below:

“The 2020 Postdoctoral Research Fellowships in Biology (PRFB) solicitation (20-602) has been released. The submission deadline is Wednesday, November 18^th, 2020.

There are three Competitive Areas:

1. Broadening Participation of Groups Underrepresented in Biology
2. Integrative Research Investigating the Rules of Life Governing Interactions Between Genomes, Environment and Phenotypes
3. Plant Genome Postdoctoral Research Fellowships

Read the solicitation carefully for changes from the previous solicitation, and follow our blog for further updates regarding this solicitation and how you can best prepare your proposal.

To see what types of projects were funded last year, view the announcement of the FY 2019 awards. Questions? Please contact the PRFB program at bio-dbi-prfb@nsf.gov.”

The Coastlines and People (CoPe) program will be holding office hours to answer questions about the CoPe solicitation (20-567).  Please register for the office hours using the links provided below. The office hours are intended to answer general questions.  Questions that are very specific to your proposal are best sent to nsfcope@nsf.gov.  Before the office hours, please review the solicitation, the FAQs (NSF 20-078) and the webinar posted on the CoPe program page.

The times for these meetings are:

Tuesday August 4th, 2020 at 1pm EDT
Wednesday August 5th, 2020 at 2:30pm EDT
Thursday August 6th, 2020 at 8:30am EDT
Thursday August 6th, 2020 at 4:00pm EDT
Friday August 7th, 2020 at 1pm EDT

Please visit the CoPe Office Hours website for the registration links.

Program Officers representing each division in BIO hosted two online informational sessions on July 1^st and July 14^th to help answer questions about the Historically Black Colleges and Universities – Excellence in Research (HBCU- EiR) program.

“The Historically Black Colleges and Universities – Excellence in Research (HBCU-EiR) program was established in response to direction provided in the Senate Commerce and Justice, Science and Related Agencies Appropriations Subcommittee Report (Senate Report 115-139), and is built on prior and continuing efforts by the National Science Foundation (NSF) to strengthen research capacity at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs). The program aims to establish stronger connections between researchers at HBCUs and NSF’s research programs.”

For those who were unable to attend, we’ve provided the PowerPoint slides here.

Remember the Letter of Intent is due July 23^rd, 2020 and if you have any questions there’s still time to reach out to any of the Program Officers listed on the informational slides above.

Our friends in IOS posted about the STEM DIVE competition . You can read their post here or in full below:

Have you been the recipient of NSF funding for a project that included partnerships for increasing diversity and inclusion in the STEM workforce?

Want to win one of (4) $2,500 Expert’s Choice Awards or one of (2) $1,250 People’s Choice Awards AND be featured on various NSF platforms?

NSF invites you to submit a 1-to-3-minute video that showcases how your NSF-funded work has led to innovative, effective, and replicable approaches to building a diverse and inclusive STEM workforce through partnerships.

The deadline for submissions in June 25th, 2020.

For more information, visit the competition website; www.nsf.gov/ehr/stemdive.jsp

The NSF deadline for the Dimensions of Biodiversity competition has been updated, and is now APRIL 20, 2020.

The updated deadlines for collaborating international agencies are below:

NSFC – April 20

FAPESP – April 20

NRF – April 30