Biodiversity on a Changing Planet | 23 542

Opportunity Information: Apply for 23 542

The National Science Foundation (NSF) program Biodiversity on a Changing Planet (BoCP) is a research grant opportunity focused on understanding how biodiversity is being reshaped by rapid environmental change, including climate change, and what those changes mean for how ecosystems function. The program starts from the premise that biodiversity underpins ecosystem health and human well-being, yet biodiversity is declining and reorganizing at an unusually fast pace. BoCP is specifically interested in the shifting dynamics of biodiversity, meaning the ongoing gain, loss, and rearrangement of organisms and biological communities over time and space, and how those shifts connect to functional biodiversity, or the roles that traits, organisms, species interactions, communities, and ecosystem processes play in natural systems. A central goal is to clarify what is changing, why it is changing, and how those changes affect resilience and ecosystem functioning on a planet undergoing major climatic and environmental disruption.

BoCP emphasizes integrative, hypothesis-driven science that connects patterns (what we observe across landscapes, seascapes, and time) with processes (the mechanisms that produce those observations). The program is looking for proposals that combine multiple scientific perspectives to tackle big, cross-cutting biodiversity questions, rather than work that sits narrowly within a single discipline. NSF highlights the need to integrate across spatial scales (from organismal traits to ecosystem-level processes) and temporal scales (from contemporary observations to deep time). This makes paleontological and geological information highly relevant alongside modern ecological and evolutionary data, because past environmental and biotic shifts can help explain present-day dynamics and improve expectations about future change.

A strong theme in the solicitation is multidisciplinary collaboration across climatic, geological, paleontological, ecological, organismal, phylogenetic, and evolutionary sciences. Competitive projects are expected to test novel ideas about how functional biodiversity emerges, persists, or collapses as biodiversity reorganizes under changing environmental conditions. In practice, this could mean combining approaches such as field ecology, trait-based biology, phylogenetics, community ecology, Earth system and climate context, fossil and sediment records, and evolutionary theory to understand how biodiversity responds to disturbance and how that response alters ecosystem functioning. The program also encourages proposals that strengthen predictive capability across time and space, particularly those that explicitly link past, present, and future biological, climatic, and geological processes to forecast functional outcomes.

BoCP is described as a cross-directorate and international NSF program, designed to support interdisciplinary teams working on grand challenges in biodiversity science. While it complements several NSF core programs, it differs by requiring an explicitly integrative framework centered on functional biodiversity in the context of shifting biodiversity dynamics under environmental change. The program anticipates making about 12 awards. The funding instrument is a discretionary grant in the science and technology research and development category, with CFDA numbers 47.050 and 47.074. The listing notes an award ceiling of 0, which typically indicates that a fixed maximum is not specified in the summary record and applicants need to consult the full solicitation for budget expectations and constraints.

The opportunity supports both US-only collaborative proposals and international collaborative proposals through formal partnerships with the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC), the Sao Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP) in Brazil, and the National Research Foundation (NRF) of South Africa. For these partnered submissions, proposals are submitted in parallel: US principal investigators submit to NSF, while collaborating investigators in China, Brazil, or South Africa submit to their respective national funding agencies under the relevant joint arrangement. The program also notes that these agreements do not prevent additional international collaborations beyond those specific partnerships, though the mechanics and expectations for those additional collaborations would be governed by NSF proposal rules and the terms described in the full announcement.

Key administrative details from the posting include the funding opportunity title Biodiversity on a Changing Planet, opportunity number 23-542, agency NSF, creation date December 31, 2022, and an original closing date of March 29, 2023. Eligibility is summarized as "Others (see text field entitled Additional Information on Eligibility for clarification)," indicating that applicants should rely on the full solicitation language for precise eligibility requirements, allowable organization types, and team composition rules.

• The National Science Foundation in the science and technology and other research and development sector is offering a public funding opportunity titled "Biodiversity on a Changing Planet" and is now available to receive applicants.
• Interested and eligible applicants and submit their applications by referencing the CFDA number(s): 47.050, 47.074.
• This funding opportunity was created on Dec 31, 2022.
• Applicants must submit their applications by Mar 29, 2023. (Agency may still review applications by suitable applicants for the remaining/unused allocated funding in 2026.)
• The number of recipients for this funding is limited to 12 candidate(s).
• Eligible applicants include: Others (see text field entitled Additional Information on Eligibility for clarification).

Apply for 23 542

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