Dr. F.E.E. Student
Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies
Box AB
Millbrook, New York, 12545
7 January 2014
Dear Dr. F.E.E. Student:
On behalf of the Ecosystem Studies Program of the Division of Environmental Biology,
of the National Science Foundation (NSF), let us thank you for agreeing to serve on this
(Mock) Proposal Review Panel. We know that reviewing proposals and serving on
panels takes considerable time and appreciate your willingness to do this important work.
Your travel to and from Arlington, VA will be paid. In addition, you will receive a
stipend that must also be used to cover the costs of your meals and lodging. Please keep
accurate records and receipts as per NSF Guidelines reference number 3g$$b42.678.
Below you will find the general NSF guidelines for proposal review. We will modify the
guidelines slightly for our purposes. First, you will not receive any confidential budgetary
information. Second, since the PIs of each proposal are from the Cary Institute we are not
asking you to consider the qualifications of the investigators. The Cary PIs who have
submitted them welcome their use for the mock panel. You should review them as
critically and fairly as you would any proposal.
You each have been assigned three proposals (see attached sheet) to read carefully so that
you can engage in a discussion about their relative merits during the panel review. Please
scan the panel summaries (1 page at the beginning of each proposal) for the proposals to
which you have not been assigned as well. All of you should read the one pre-proposal
(“Lawns”), since it represents a new (as of January 2012) procedure for NSF.
Please note that these proposals are CONFIDENTIAL. They should not be copied,
cited, or used in any way—you should destroy and/or delete all proposal
information before leaving the Cary Institute. This is critically important to the
integrity of the process.
For your assigned proposals, we ask that you make written notes (not longer than 1 page)
about the proposal in advance of the discussion. Please use NSF’s “intellectual merit”
and “broader impacts” criteria (see information below) as a guide. Your notes should
include what the proposal is about, and capture strengths and weaknesses in regard to
intellectual merit and broader impacts. Finally, you should come to the panel meeting
with your recommendation for the proposals assigned to you using the categories below
(E, VG, G, F, P). Please make this determination on your own without consulting
colleagues:
Excellent (should be supported, no major deficiencies); Very good (high priority for
support, but some minor deficiencies); Good (worthy of support, but has some
deficiencies that can be solved); Fair (very significant issues); Poor (serious problems,
fatal flaws).
Bring your reviews to the panel meeting on Thursday afternoon (we will not collect
them).
On a typical panel, each of you would present one to five proposals as a “lead” over the
course of two days, and be involved as a secondary discussant on 10-15 more.
Obviously, this is a streamlined mock panel. Thus, seven lead panelists (presenters) have
been picked. The presenter’s job is to: (1) summarize the main points of the proposal
and its strengths and weaknesses in regard to intellectual merit and broader impacts. This
should be done in no more than 5 minutes, and, (2) bring your group --all other people
assigned to review the proposal-- to a consensus recommendation (competitive, or not
competitive); (3) The presenter should then ask for each of the other readers’ rankings
and lead a 5 minute (maximum) discussion of the proposal. An effective way to initiate
this is to ask the most extreme (in terms of scores) reviewers to explain their position.
After discussion of all the proposals, the entire panel will rank them and propose funding
one.
I will play the role of the Program Director and moderate the panel. Program Directors
keep the discussion going, listen carefully (since the panel is advisory to the Program
Directors), and steer it away from things the panel should not discuss.
Please do let me know if you have any questions.
Sincerely,
Kathleen C. Weathers
2014 FEE Ecosystem Panel Program Director
CRITERIA FOR REVIEWING PROPOSALS (excerpted from recent National
Science Board report)
When evaluating NSF proposals, reviewers should consider what the proposers want to
do, why they want to do it, how they plan to do it, how they will know if they succeed,
and what benefits would accrue if the project is successful. These issues apply both to the
technical aspects of the proposal and the way in which the project may make broader
contributions. To that end, reviewers are asked to evaluate all proposals against two
criteria: Intellectual Merit: The intellectual Merit criterion encompasses the potential to
advance knowledge; and Broader Impacts: The Broader Impacts criterion encompasses
the potential to benefit society and contribute to the achievement of specific, desired
societal outcomes.
The following elements should be considered in the review for both criteria:
1. What is the potential for the proposed activity to a. advance knowledge and
understanding within its own field or across different fields (Intellectual Merit); and b.
benefit society or advance desired societal outcomes (Broader Impacts)?
2. To what extent do the proposed activities suggest and explore creative, original, or
potentially transformative concepts?
3. Is the plan for carrying out the proposed activities well-reasoned, well-organized, and
based on a sound rationale? Does the plan incorporate a mechanism to assess success?
4. How well qualified is the individual, team, or institution to conduct the proposed
activities? WE ARE NOT ASKING YOU TO ADDRESS THIS FOR THE MOCK
PANEL
5. Are there adequate resources available to the PI (either at the home institution
or through collaborations) to carry out the proposed activities? WE ARE NOT ASKING
YOU TO ADDRESS THIS FOR THE MOCK PANEL
ADDENDUM: LTREB Guidelines
Two of the proposals for this mock panel (Acorns and Hudson) are LTREBs (long-term
research in environmental biology). Below is the description of additional criteria for
LTREBs.
I. LTREB INTRODUCTION (from www.nsf.gov)
Many important questions in organismal biology, ecology, ecosystem science and
evolutionary biology can only be addressed with long-term data. Research areas include,
but are not limited to, populations or predator-prey systems that oscillate over decades;
communities of organisms that have extended life spans and long turnover times; pools of
materials such as nutrients in soils that turn over at intermediate to longer time scales;
external forcing functions such as climatic cycles that operate over long return intervals;
and behavioral dynamics, stress physiology, or energetic condition of long-lived
organisms. Investigators often are constrained in addressing questions in these areas or
studying these phenomena by the relatively short support periods associated with typical
research awards. In recognition of this problem, the Divisions of Environmental Biology
(DEB) and Integrative Organismal
Systems (IOS) encourage investigators to apply for LTREB awards. These awards are
designed to provide the funding to maintain an ongoing, long-term research project for a
period of a decade or longer. Because the usefulness of long-term data sets extends
beyond typical scientific publications, a means of sharing data with other investigators
should stimulate synthesis and generation of novel ideas. The results also should be of
interest to the general public. To take advantage of the unique informational aspects of
long-term projects, LTREB investigators will be required to implement mechanisms of
data sharing in the broadest manner possible.
II. PROGRAM DESCRIPTION
The NSF seeks to stimulate and enhance long-term perspectives on problems in
organismal and environmental biology. Long-term environmental research is funded
through two NSF programs – Long-term Ecological Research (LTER) and LTREB. The
two programs are different. LTER projects are funded in response to calls for specific
proposals, are evaluated by a special panel, and are characterized by multiple
investigators conducting multi-disciplinary investigations at large temporal and spatial
scales. In contrast, LTREB projects are submitted to annual target dates, evaluated by
appropriate programmatic panels (Evolutionary Processes, Population and Community
Ecology, Ecosystem Studies, Behavioral Systems, Physiological and Structural Systems)
and are initiated by one or a few investigators. Examples of current LTREB awards can
be viewed at http://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/ by including “LTREB” in a title search.
The LTREB Program intends to support decadal projects. Funding for an initial, 5-year
period requires submission of a preliminary proposal and, if invited, submission of a full
15-page proposal following the guidelines in the Grant Proposal Guide. A cogent
conceptual framework for a decadal research plan is a required and a critical part of the
initial proposal. This plan must clearly articulate important questions that cannot be
answered with the data in hand, but that could be answered if ten additional years of data
were collected. Proposals for renewal of support for a second 5-year period are limited to
8 pages in length and will be evaluated using the standard NSF Merit Review Criteria and
three additional criteria: 1) progress made toward long-term goals during the initial 5year award, 2) a brief description of planned research activities and 3) evidence that
previous data are available to the broader research community. Preliminary proposals are
NOT required for LTREB renewals, and full LTREB renewal proposals will be accepted
annually for the August 1 deadline.
Projects submitted for LTREB funding must address questions that require long-term
data collection to be answered. Investigators must present a conceptual framework that
spans at least ten years. This framework will be a critical component of an initial 5-year
proposal, and questions or hypotheses outlined in this framework must guide any
subsequent renewal. At least six years of data must have been collected continuously at
an appropriate time interval (for example, monthly or annually) and must be documented
to seek LTREB funding. These data should motivate the new questions posed and the
decadal research plan provided. Justification must be provided for continuing data
collection for at least ten years beyond the initial six-year period. Although most LTREB
projects involve field studies, some laboratory projects (for example, long-term selection
experiments) may also be suitable for
LTREB funding. The approach to data collection must be hypothesis driven. The LTREB
Program does not support basic monitoring efforts.
Decadal Research Plan: As described above, this plan should clearly articulate important
questions that cannot be addressed with data that have already been collected, but could
be answered if ten additional years of data were collected. This plan is not a research
timeline or management plan. It is a concise justification for ten additional years of
support in order to advance understanding of key concepts, questions, or theories in
organismal and environmental biology.
Plan for Data Management and Dissemination: Data from long-term research projects
have value beyond the peer-reviewed and other publications generated by the
investigators collecting the data. Other researchers may develop new perspectives on the
same long-term data or new ideas may arise from a combination of long-term data sets.
Also, long-term data are expected to be of special interest to the public. Therefore, all
proposals must describe details of information management and plans for data sharing
with the broader research community and the interested public. This plan should be
submitted as a Supplementary Document, following guidelines in the NSF GPG.
LTREB Renewals: To implement the decadal time frame intended for LTREB projects,
proposals for renewed support during a second, five-year period do not require
submission of a preliminary proposal. They will be evaluated using the standard NSF
Merit
Review Criteria and three additional criteria: 1) progress made toward the decadal
research plan outlined in the initial five-year award, 2) a brief description of planned
research activities to complete this decadal plan, and 3) evidence that previouslycollected data (at least 6-11 years) are available to the broader research community.
Research activities must address questions or hypotheses that are consonant with the
initial decadal research plan. Renewal proposals are limited to 8 pages (project
description). Titles for renewal proposals must begin with "LTREB Renewal:" The only
proposals eligible for submission as an LTREB Renewal are those that continue projects
that began via an LTREB award with a decadal research plan.
All proposals submitted to the LTREB Program are co-reviewed by participating Clusters
in the Division of Environmental Biology (Ecosystem Science, Population and
Community Ecology, and Evolutionary Processes) and the Division of Integrative
Organismal Systems (Behavioral Systems, Physiological and Structural Systems).
Proposals must address topics supported by these programs.
4 Researchers are strongly encouraged to contact cognizant program officers to ensure
that their projects are appropriate for this program. Ecological research on marine
populations, communities and ecosystems is not supported by LTREB and should be
directed to the Biological Oceanography Program:
(http://www.nsf.gov/funding/pgm_summ.jsp?pims_id=11696&org=OCE). However,
proposals addressing long-term questions focused on marine organisms that are
consonant with areas of research supported by the Behavioral Systems Cluster and the
Physiological and Structural Systems Cluster in IOS are appropriate for LTREB, as are
proposals to examine the evolutionary dynamics of marine populations or communities.
Investigators who are uncertain about the suitability of their research for LTREB are
encouraged to contact one of the managing program officers listed in this solicitation.
RED= lead reviewer
FEE proposal assignments 2014 Proposals
Ahmed Hassabelkreem
Ana Soares
Dorothy Borowy
Elizabeth Kulka
Emily Herstoff
Francine Mejia
Hua Shang
Jacob Zwart
James Junker
Julie Kelso
Kaitlin Farrell
Marian Schmidt
Satria Oktarita
Steven Epting
Benjamin Miller
Arial Shogren
Worms
2
Freeze
LTREB
Watersheds Hudson
2
LTREB
Acorns
Adelgid
2
2
2
2
2
2
2
2
2
2
2
2
2
2
2
2
2
2
2
2
2
2
2
2
2
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2
2
2
2
2
2
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2
Lawns-PRE
ALL
2
2
2
2
Squeal
2
2
2
2
2