| Upcoming 2012 Annual Membership Meeting | | The draft agenda for the upcoming 2012 Annual Membership Meeting (2012-10-17 - 2012-10-18) will be released soon. It is not too late to suggest agenda items for the meeting. This will be the first joint annual meeting between the Association for Ecosystem Research Centers (AERC) and NEON, Inc. All AERC and NEON meeting events will be open to registered attendees, providing a rich suite of opportunities to learn about emerging topics and network with scientists from different communities. As in previous years, a limited number of travel awards will be made available for early career scientists. |
| Upcoming NEON, Inc. Board Election: Seeking Candidates | |
The NEON, Inc. Board of Directors is responsible for defining NEON, Inc.'s mission and providing overall leadership and strategic direction to the organization. The NEON, Inc. bylaws stipulate that the Board comprise two groups of Directors: At-Large and Membership. The latter group are elected by NEON, Inc.'s institutional member representatives, while the former group are elected by the Directors then in-office. Each Director serves a three-year term.
Two seats from the Membership Group will become vacant at the end of 2012. Your respective Institutional Member Representative will cast a vote for those two seats in mid September. Prior to that, the Board seeks suggestions on individuals who should be considered for inclusion in this year's slate of election candidates. If you have ideas, please contact your Member Representative. Suggestions may be submitted up till August 6 (Monday) close-of-business Hawaii time.
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| Developments on the Digital Frontier |
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As part of our continuing effort to keep subscribers informed of developments on the environmental / ecological informatics frontier, here is a compendium of events past and upcoming that may be of interest to you:
- EarthCube Charette (Recent Event): The goal of the NSF EarthCube is to transform the conduct of research by supporting the development of community-guided cyberinfrastructure to integrate data and information for knowledge management across the Geosciences. NEON participated in the EarthCube Charette that was held in the Washington DC area from June 12 - 14, 2012.
- BIO Centers and Center-like activities awardee meeting on Cyberinfrastructure (Recent Event): NEON was involved in an NSF sponsored meeting on June 27, 2012 at the Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center (SeSynC) in Annapolis, MD. The meeting was organized to identify and prioritize cyberinfrastructure activities and needs among NSF-funded biological research centers and center-like organizations and determine the extent of coordination necessary to allow an independent and evolving network to thrive and add value to existing and future investments across a broad research community.
- Semantics of Biodiversity workshop (Recent Event): NEON was involved in a workshop at the University of Kansas (a NEON, Inc. Member Institution) Biodiversity Institute focused on linking data across disciplines in order to better understand the drivers and effects of biodiversity.
- 2012-08-07. Data Sharing in Ecology workshop: NEON is co-organizing a workshop at the 2012 ESA Annual Meeting titled "WK 29 - Data Sharing In Ecology: Breaking Down the Cultural Barriers".
- 2012-07-15. DataONE Users Group: The two day meeting is adjacent to the ESIP meeting in Madison, WI.
- 2012-07-17. Earth Science Information Partners (ESIP): ESIP meets in Madison, WI and registration is still available for in-person or virtual participation. To waive the virtual participation fee, use the registration code "EarthCube".
- 2012-07-19. National Academies of Science Symposium of Digital Curation: The Board on Research Data and Information (BRDI) of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) is holding a 1-day "Symposium on Digital Curation in the Era of Big Data: Career Opportunities and Educational Requirements." The event is open and free to the public. Email Alvar Mattei if you are interested.
- 2013-03-11. e-Biosphere: The 2013 conference, to be held in London, is themed "Working Across Dimensions of Biodiversity Informatics". The conference organizers are looking for sessions that will explore ways to assemble and use biodiversity data that cross traditional community boundaries. Individuals interested in proposing and organizing sessions should contact David Schindel.
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| Science Communications Workshops |
NSF will be holding a workshop Science: Becoming the Messenger on August 22, 2012, at the Salt Lake City Marriott City Center, 220 South State Street, Salt Lake City, Utah 84111.
NSF welcomes principal investigators (PI), early career researchers and engineers, graduate students and postdocs from institutions and universities in Utah who would like to learn to communicate effectively to a broad audience. Featuring three accomplished communicators and trainers--Emmy award winning television producer Joe Schreiber, former PBS executive Dan Agan and bestselling science author Chris Mooney--the NSF workshop "Science: Becoming the Messenger" provides one-stop shopping for those seeking to reach a broader public about their work. Over the course of this full day of training, participants will learn how to craft a message and deliver it to a variety of audiences. They will also have the opportunity to experience live interview training, to develop writing and new media skills, to hone their public presentations and even to produce video. |
Solicitations of Potential Interest to the NEON Community
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Please click the respective links to check the original source of information. The abbreviated text below may not reflect amendments to the original announcements, and may not reflect the original intent of the solicitation. The "New" icons indicate recent new announcements (includes announcements for regular solicitations), and not necessarily new programs. These are primarily, though not limited to, NSF solicitations. Not all new announcements are included in the list below.  Alliances for Graduate Education and the Professoriate (AGEP) Proposal Preparation Webinars - Excerpt: The Alliances for Graduate Education and the Professoriate (AGEP) is announcing several proposal preparation webinars for those interested in responding to the most recent AGEP solicitation NSF 12-554. The goal of the AGEP program is to increase the numbers of African Americans, Hispanic Americans, American Indians, Alaska Natives, Native Hawaiians and other Pacific Islanders (URMs), including URMs with disabilities entering and completing graduate education and postdoctoral training to levels representative of the available pool of URMs. These webinars will focus on the proposal preparation for the AGEP-Transformation track.
- Critical Dates: See NSF website.
- NASA Research: Development and Testing of Potential Indicators For The National Climate Assessment
- Excerpt: NASA has made significant contributions to the U.S. National Climate Assessment (NCA), a central component of the 2012-2022 U.S. Global Change Research Program's Strategic Plan, and intends to continue supporting the NCA. Indicators are anticipated to be an important component of future NCAs. These indicators are intended to provide a clear and concise way of communicating to the NCA audiences about not only status and trends of physical drivers of the climate system, but also the ecological and socioeconomic impacts, vulnerabilities, and responses to those drivers. This ROSES element solicits contributions to enhance NASA's participation in future NCAs by encouraging the developing and testing of potential indicators that address the needs expressed in the NCA vision for a national system of indicators and that largely draw from NASA-produced data and/or modeling products.
- Critical Dates: See NASA website.
- EPSCoR Research Infrastructure Improvement Program Track-1: (RII Track-1)
- Excerpt: The Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR) is designed to fulfill the mandate of the National Science Foundation (NSF) to promote scientific progress nationwide. The EPSCoR program is directed at those jurisdictions that have historically received lesser amounts of NSF Research and Development (R&D) funding. Thirty one jurisdictions, including twenty-eight states, the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, Guam and the U. S. Virgin Islands are currently eligible to participate.
- Critical Dates: 2012-10-03
- Advances in Biological Informatics (ABI)
- Excerpt: The ABI program is especially interested in proposals that offer potentially transformative outcomes through the development of informatics tools and resources that (1) offer novel and significant advances in the use of biological data and/or (2) will enable and stimulate advances through their impact on a significant segment of the biological research community supported by the NSF BIO Directorate.
- Critical Dates: 2012-09-10; 2013-08-13
- Advancing Digitization of Biodiversity Collections (ADBC)
- Excerpt: This program seeks to enhance and expand the national resource of digital data documenting existing vouchered biological and paleontological collections and to advance scientific knowledge by improving access to digitized information (including images) residing in vouchered scientific collections across the United States.
- Critical Dates: 2012-10-19
- Dear Colleague Letter: Cyberinfrastructure Coordination for Multi-User Research Facilities
- Excerpt: This Dear Colleague Letter is to inform the NSF Research Facilities community of NSF's interest in fostering further coordination and integration among multi-user facilities in the planning, development, implementation, and utilization of cyberinfrastructure and to announce the availability of supplemental funds to incentivize these activities.
- Critical Dates: Supplemental funding requests must be submitted by 2012-07-20.
- Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL)
- Excerpt: The Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) solicitation invites investigators to propose ideas, concepts, models, and other opportunities for learning and learning environments that will capture the creative and innovative potential of informal STEM learning for the future, and potentially forge new connections across all STEM learning communities. The ISE program expects to make approximately 34 awards based on anticipated funding of $20 million in FY 2013 for new awards. It is anticipated that approximately 6 Research, 6 Pathways, 13 Full-Scale Development, 2 Broad Implementation, plus approximately 7 conferences, EAGERS, and Rapids will be made as Standard or Continuing Grants, pending availability of funds.
- Critical Dates: Preliminary proposal (optional): 2012-08-14. Full proposal: 2013-01-14.
- Data Infrastructure Building Blocks (DIBBs)
- Excerpt: DIBBs is an integral part of NSF's CIF21 portfolio and seeks to provide support for the following research activities: (1) Conceptualization Awards are planning awards aimed at further developing disciplinary and interdisciplinary communities' understanding of their data storage and management requirements with the goal of developing an initial prototype; (2) Implementation awards will support development and implementation of technologies addressing a subset of elements of the data preservation and access lifecycle, including acquisition; documentation; security and integrity; storage; access, analysis and dissemination; migration; and deaccession; (3) Interoperability awards will develop frameworks that provide consistency or commonality of design across communities and implementation for data acquisition, management, preservation, sharing, dissemination, etc.
- Critical Dates: See NSF website.
- IGERT-CIF21
- Excerpt: Within the Cyberinfrastructure Framework for 21st Century Science and Engineering (CIF21) and IGERT, NSF recognizes the need to educate and support a next generation of researchers able to address fundamental challenges in 1) core techniques and technologies for advancing big data science and engineering; 2) analyzing and dealing with challenging computational and data enabled science and engineering (CDS&E) problems, and 3) researching, providing, and using the cyberinfrastructure that makes cutting-edge CDS&E research possible in any and all disciplines.
- Critical Dates: Full proposal: 2012-08-06.
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| Submit a Comment / Suggestion (Anonymous) | Submit a comment
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Key Dates in 2012
| 8/5 - 8/10: ESA Annual Meeting (Portland, OR)
9/30 - 10/5: EcoSummit 2012 (Columbus, OH)
10/17 - 10/18: NEON, Inc. Annual Meeting (Washington, DC)
10/18 - 10/19: AERC Annual Meeting (Washington, DC)
12/6 - 12/10: AGU Annual Meeting (San Francisco, CA) |
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