Cyberinfrastructure for Environmental Observatories: Prototype Systems to Address Cross-Cutting Needs (CEO:P)  

PROGRAM GUIDELINES

Announcement  06-505

As announced on May 21st, proposers must prepare and submit proposals to the National Science Foundation (NSF) using the NSF FastLane system at http://www.fastlane.nsf.gov/. This approach is being taken to support efficient Grants.gov operations during this busy workload period and in response to OMB direction guidance issued March 9, 2009. NSF will continue to post information about available funding opportunities to Grants.gov FIND and will continue to collaborate with institutions who have invested in system-to-system submission functionality as their preferred proposal submission method. NSF remains committed to the long-standing goal of streamlined grants processing and plans to provide a web services interface for those institutions that want to use their existing grants management systems to directly submit proposals to NSF.

Please be advised that the NSF Proposal & Award Policies & Procedures Guide (PAPPG) includes revised guidelines to implement the mentoring provisions of the America COMPETES Act (ACA) (Pub. L. No. 110-69, Aug. 9, 2007.) As specified in the ACA, each proposal that requests funding to support postdoctoral researchers must include a description of the mentoring activities that will be provided for such individuals. Proposals that do not comply with this requirement will be returned without review (see the PAPP Guide Part I: Grant Proposal Guide Chapter II for further information about the implementation of this new requirement).

SYNOPSIS

Spatially extensive observing systems for environmental research, together with the increasingly interdisciplinary nature of research on the dynamics of complex environmental systems, create the need for a sophisticated information infrastructure to support these observing systems and to facilitate the integrated use of data from them. There are a number of questions about how to best construct such a cyberinfrastructure. To help answer these questions and to promote planning for Cyberinfrastructure for Environmental Observatories (CEO), this solicitation requests proposals for the development of practical environmental cyberinfrastructure prototypes along with a demonstration of their capability to answer significant environmental research questions. Proposals should be for projects that pursue an end-to-end approach to an information infrastructure prototype. Proposals should identify the types of data involved and the ways in which users might wish to use such data. The proposed projects should include the careful exploration of use cases followed by deployment of a prototype that implements these use cases.

Abstracts of Recent Awards Made Through This Program