Application deadline: 2 July 2013, 4pm

“Trees have significant impacts on rural and urban landscapes and contribute to our heritage, ecosystems, rural economy and wellbeing. Trees can also help to mitigate climate change by capturing and storing carbon. Research into the preservation of the health of trees, woodlands and forests, and associated interactions with the environment, economy and society has the potential to be of great benefit.”

“Recently, new pests and pathogens have emerged as significant risks to the UK’s woodlands, commercial forests and urban trees, and globalisation of the plant trade has led to a marked increase in the volume and diversity of plants and plant products entering the UK, which can lead to pests and pathogens, not previously present entering the country.”

“This initiative will provide a commitment of up to £9M over the next few years to support strategic research in this area under the auspices of the Living With Environmental Change (LWEC) Partnership. The initiative also directly supports the objectives of the joint Defra and Forestry Commission Tree Health and Plant Biosecurity Action Plan launched in October 2011.”

[Source Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council website:   http://www.bbsrc.ac.uk/funding/opportunities/2013/tree-health-and-plant-biosecurity-phase2.aspx  ]

“The Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and the College of Policing are inviting proposals for a Commissioned Partnership Programme in support of the What Works Centre for Crime Reduction.”

“Applications may be made for up to £3.28 million (at 100 per cent fEC) for a period of up to three years. The scheme is open to all staff at research organisations eligible for research council funding.”

“The aim of the centre is to provide synthesis, evaluation and communication of the evidence base in support of policy implementation in the crime reduction arena. The primary customers for the outputs of the centre will be decision-makers and practitioners, including Police and Crime Commissioners; using evidence to ensure the best outcomes of their work. The deadline for submission of full proposals is 16.00, 18 June 2013.”

For further information go to:  http://www.esrc.ac.uk/funding-and-guidance/funding-opportunities/25949/what-works-partnership-in-crime-reduction.aspx?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+ESRCCurrentFundingOpportunities+%28ESRC+Current+Funding+Opportunities%29&utm_content=Google+Reader

[Source ESRC website as above]

“The Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) is inviting applications for projects of up to four months which consider the use of NERC environmental data in the development of applications, products and services.”

“Funding of up to £15K is available to researchers to undertake preliminary projects to:

•Liaise with businesses and other end-users to understand their requirements and gauge their interest in a product, service or application, which uses NERC-funded data;

•Development of, in discussion with the end-user, a mock up or ‘storyboard’ to visualise what the product, service or application may look like.

•The working up of datasets, preferably from NERC Data Centres, which are of interest to business and other end-users, to ensure they will be accessible, in preparation for a forthcoming Technology Strategy Board/NERC joint New Business Solutions from Environmental Data feasibility project call.”

“Projects could address one or more of the points above and should be based around the following sectors:

•Transport,

•Energy,

•Built Environment / Future Cities,

•Agriculture and Food.”

“Applications must include the use of NERC-funded data / information (and where appropriate integrated with data sourced from elsewhere).”

[NERC website:  http://www.nerc.ac.uk/funding/available/schemes/enviro-data.asp ]

“This call invites proposals for collaborations between academic groups in the UK and the USA in the area of Water Engineering. The call is placed within the context of the global grand challenges of Resilience and Sustainability identified at a recent international summit. The collaborative and interdisciplinary nature of the call aims to encourage proposals that bring different, complementary sets of knowledge, skills and experience together, and which add value to existing engineering research activities.”

“Supplementary funding is available from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) for UK groups to collaborate with groups in the USA. Funding is only available for work which is supplementary to current research funded by EPSRC, and applicants will be required to submit their application to the EPSRC for assessment. Through a parallel activity, the National Science Foundation (NSF) will fund US groups working in the same field to collaborate with groups in the UK.”

[Source EPSRC website:  http://www.epsrc.ac.uk/funding/calls/open/Pages/cleanwaterforall.aspx ]

“A new funding opportunity for environment-related research that could include arts and humanities perspectives has just been announced.” 

“The UK Droughts and Water Scarcity research programme is a five-year interdisciplinary, £12m+ Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) research programme in collaboration with the Economic and Social Research Council, Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council and the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). The programme’s research will be UK-focused with the objective to support improved decision-making in relation to droughts and water scarcity.   Proposals involving research and researchers across the whole of AHRC’s remit are strongly encouraged to be involved in the consortia for example, by addressing issues and questions that increase our understanding of the cultural and historical experience of droughts and human responses to it.”

Further information can be found at: http://www.nerc.ac.uk/research/programmes/droughts/events/ao.asp

[Source AHRC news: http://www.ahrc.ac.uk/News-and-Events/News/Pages/UK-Droughts-and-water-Scarcity.aspx ]

“Applications are invited for grants under the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)’s Cultural Value Project.”

“In launching this two-year Cultural Value Project, the AHRC wishes to make a major contribution to how we think about the value of arts and culture to individuals and to society. The objective of the Project is to develop a framework within which the different components of cultural value will be identified and to establish for each of the components methodologies and appropriate types of evidence for evaluating their contribution.”

“We anticipate funding between 20 and 40 projects from a range of disciplinary, conceptual and methodological perspectives. The call is designed to provide better understanding of the strength and weaknesses of the existing body of research, to address the gaps in current research, and to advance innovative ways of defining, evidencing and evaluating the various ways in which arts and cultural activities generate value.”

“For full information on criteria, areas of particular interest, eligibility, assessment procedures and supporting documents required please see [the] funding call document: http://www.ahrc.ac.uk/Funding-Opportunities/Documents/Funding%20Call%20(final)%20-%20IB%20comments.pdf “

“Applications should be submitted through the Je-S system at the latest by 4pm on Tuesday, 16 April 2013, and will need to go through the appropriate institution submission process.”

[Source AHRC website:  http://www.ahrc.ac.uk/Funding-Opportunities/Pages/CVP-Funding-Call.aspx ]

“The Digital R&D Fund for the Arts is a partnership between Arts Council England, Arts and Humanities Research Council and Nesta to support innovative digital projects that enable new audience experiences and sustainable business models for the arts.”

“Over the last year eight pilot projects, each with very different approaches, have received funding to look at how they could use digital technology, combined with research, to extend their reach and/or offering.  From a ticketing app for students to social networking for artists to share ideas, each pilot project approached the integration of technology and research in an individual way, and with varied results.”

“The first nine successful applicants to the £7 million Fund have recently been announced… and the Fund is open for expressions of interest and applications until 30 December 2013.”

More information on the application process, including key eligibility criteria, is available at: www.artsdigitalrnd.org.uk/content/how-apply   

[Source AHRC News: http://www.ahrc.ac.uk/News-and-Events/News/Pages/Arts-Sector-to-Benefit-from-Digital-R+D-Learning.aspx ]

“Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) is offering up to £2M to support crowd sourcing projects for biological sciences. The funding will develop and deploy crowd sourcing approaches to complex, large-scale scientific problems within the remit of BBSRC.”

“Crowd sourcing is a community-based approach to tackling difficult or complex problems. It splits the problem into pieces, distributes the pieces to a large number of individuals (and/or computers), and the completed pieces are returned to a central system to formulate the overall solution.”

“In recent years crowd sourcing has been deployed to tackle complex problems and to build research community resources. Examples have seen crowd sourcing use to re-design a protein, perform microscopic analysis of biomedical samples and even search for molecules that could make cancer treatment candidates.”

“The call for research proposals to make use of this funding encompasses establishing the software, organising and conducting crowd sourcing, the generation of high quality bioscience data and creation of new knowledge.”

Intention to submit deadline: 5 March 2013, 4pm

Full call application deadline: 9 April 2013, 4pm

For further details go to:  http://www.bbsrc.ac.uk/funding/opportunities/2013/crowd-sourcing-biological-sciences.aspx

[Source BBSRC News:  http://www.bbsrc.ac.uk/news/research-technologies/2013/130213-n-crowd-sourcing-for-biology.aspx?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+bbsrc+%28BBSRC+-+News+stories+and+features%29&utm_content=Google+Reader

“On 5 February, ten international research funders jointly announced their participation in round three of the Digging into Data Challenge, a grant competition designed to spur computationally intensive research in the humanities and social sciences.”

“During the first two rounds of the Challenge, held in 2009 and 2011, nearly 150 teams, representing universities from across Canada, the Netherlands, the US, and the UK, competed to demonstrate how innovative, computationally intensive research methods could be used to address questions in the humanities and social sciences. Twenty-two of those teams were awarded grants during those earlier rounds, each of them demonstrating new methods for analysing vast digital resources used for humanities and social science research, like digital books, survey data, economic data, newspapers, music, and other scholarly, scientific, and cultural heritage resources that are now being digitized on a huge scale.”

“Due to the overwhelming popularity of the earlier rounds, the Digging into Data Challenge is pleased to announce that two additional funders have joined for round three, enabling this competition to have a world-wide reach into many different scholarly and scientific domains.”  “Jisc (United Kingdom) will be taking a supportive role by facilitating the progression of the project.”

“The closing date for applications is 15 May 2013. Further information about the competition and the application process (including all relevant documentation) can be found on the Digging for Data website: http://www.diggingintodata.org/ “

[Source Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) website:  http://www.esrc.ac.uk/funding-and-guidance/funding-opportunities/15008/digging-into-data-challenge.aspx?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+ESRCCurrentFundingOpportunities+%28ESRC+Current+Funding+Opportunities%29&utm_content=Google+Reader ]

“The RCUK Global Uncertainties (GU) Programme is inviting outline proposals for collaborative research which will contribute to enhancing the UK’s cybersecurity.”

“Business-academic collaborations in cybersecurity to harness underpinning science (BACCHUS) is a pilot for a series of similar calls under the umbrella of the ‘Global Uncertainties Challenge’. Other activities relating to, for example, Trans-National Organised Crime or Terrorism, are being considered for the future.”

“Academic teams funded through this pilot initiative will need to build and sustain at least one significant, active, collaboration with a non-academic user of the research to accelerate the work and ensure its relevance.”

For more information go to:  http://www.epsrc.ac.uk/funding/calls/open/Pages/cybersecurity.aspx

[Source Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) website as above]