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Marine Ecosystems

Announcement of Opportunity:
Outline bid proposals

Closing date for outline bid proposals: 16:00 on 31 January 2013

The Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) and the Department for the Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (Defra) are inviting outline bid proposals for the Marine Ecosystems research programme.

Summary

Outline proposals are invited for a major new research programme on Marine Ecosystems. This £6m programme is co-funded by Defra and will contribute towards the objectives of the cross-council programmes, Living With Environmental Change and Global Food Security.

This programme directly relates to the delivery of the NERC Biodiversity theme and aims to improve our understanding of how marine ecosystems are being impacted by on-going environmental change, to develop more realistic marine ecosystem models and test potential management solutions.

This call is for large consortium-type proposals, costing around £4·2m, that meet the stated requirements. While this is the programme's main call for proposals and will only fund one large consortium-type grant, there may be an opportunity for another call to be issued in 2015 that will fund a few smaller grants for collaborative research in support of Work Package 1.

A workshop will be held on 6 December 2012 at the Plymouth Marine Laboratory (PML) to ensure the research community is aware of the NERC National Capability available to support research, including facilities, time-series, and modelling, as well as the collaboration opportunities arising from NERC research programmes (eg Shelf Sea Biogeochemistry, Biodiversity & Ecosystem Service Sustainability (BESS)) and the programmes of potential partners (eg Centre for Environment, Fisheries & Aquaculture Science (Cefas), Marine Scotland, and the Agri-Food & Bioresources Institute (AFBI)).

The workshop will also provide a forum for discussion of the science challenges and possible approaches to undertaking the research, as well as provide an opportunity to identify potential collaborations and partnerships.

Registrations to attend the workshop from those interested in submitting proposals are invited by 23 November 2012. Attendance is encouraged but is not a prerequisite for submitting a proposal to this call. Attendance will be limited to 50, therefore the number registering from the same research group should be managed appropriately. Please register online for the Marine Ecosystems workshop.

Proposals for this call are invited from eligible UK researchers (see NERC Research Grants Handbook for standard eligibility criteria) including, for this programme, researchers at Cefas.

Please see the full Announcement of Opportunity document below for full details of the call.

Announcement of Opportunity (281KB)

The closing date for outline proposals is 16:00 on 31 January 2013.

For further information about this Announcement of Opportunity please contact:

Rachel Leader
Tel: 01793 411595