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Prioritisation criteria for Marine Facilities Bids

To ensure that NERC marine facilities are programmed in a fair and transparent manner, and to avoid discriminating between cruise bids by having to (re)assess science quality or consider NERC funding type, a number of criteria are used to prioritise bids as outlined below. In using these criteria NERC will also seek to use the specialist capabilities of its ships in the most effective way to support the NERC science programmes. For example the RRS James Clark Ross will be programmed to utilise its polar capabilities.

In the first instance the primary criteria will be used but in the event that these do not discriminate sufficiently between competing bids (eg two NERC-funded science cruises bidding for the same period of time) then secondary criteria will be used.

In the rare event that the secondary criteria cannot be used to determine the relative priority of competing bids to the satisfaction of the Principal Scientists concerned, a decision on prioritisation of cruise bids will be taken by NERC's Director of Science Delivery.

Primary criteria (in priority order)

  1. NERC funded science and logistics
  2. Non-NERC funded (including Europe or USA) science that is within NERC's remit
  3. Commissioned research to do science that is within NERC's remit

Secondary criteria (in priority order):

  1. Opportunity: where it can clearly be demonstrated that the opportunity to run a cruise is only in the year of programming. Examples of cruise bids in the category include:
    • Antarctic logistics - because the opportunity to deliver Antarctic logistics is time-limited, these bids will, by necessity, be a higher priority than any science cruise bids;
    • Recovery of marine equipment (eg moorings and landers) - where the opportunity to recover equipment and data from long-standing deployments is clearly time-limited;
    • Temporal sequence of cruises - where a cruise bid is part of a temporal sequence of cruises (for example a series of NERC consortium-funded cruises) that has already started.
  2. Time efficiency: where there is an opportunity to programme cruises in a way that maximises the number of NERC science days at sea. For example, a cruise that requires a considerable number of passage days may be of lower priority if there are other science cruises (with little, or no, passage time) bidding for the available time slot.
  3. Cost-effectiveness: where it is clearly more cost-effective for NERC to programme a cruise. For example, a bid for a geophysics cruise may be of higher priority if it can be programmed back-to-back with another geophysics cruise because there are considerable cost savings for NERC's science budget in only having to pay once for the large costs associated with geophysics equipment set-up and mobilisation.

In using these secondary criteria, priority will be given to (in priority order):

  1. Bids for cruises that have previously been postponed by NERC;
  2. Bids from NERC's international barter partners;
  3. Bids that were carried-over from a previous year;
  4. Bids for long-term time series, where as a minimum NERC will aim to deliver four out of five cruises.