BECC (Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services in a Changing Climate) welcomes proposals for research funding within the vision and aims of BECC for the years 2020-21. This is a joint call between Lund university (LU) (up to 7 million SEK) and University of Gothenburg (UGOT) (up to 2 million SEK) and aims at a continued consolidation of the collaboration between research groups within and between Lund and Gothenburg universities, with the BECC Research Strategy 2020-2025 as a point of departure.

Main applicants who were successful in BECC’s following calls cannot receive funding.

• “Call for funding BECC post docs (2019-2020)”, or
• “Call for project funding for researchers to apply BECC doctoral studentships 2018-“

General information

BECC is a strategic research area, which brings together research on climate-ecosystem-biodiversity relationships from natural and societal perspectives at LU and UGOT. BECC strives to assess the combined consequences of climate and land-use change on biodiversity, ecosystem functions and services and provide a basis for informed societal responses, with a focus on critical changes in forest, agricultural, urban and subarctic ecosystems, including interactions between terrestrial and aquatic systems. The focus is on Swedish conditions, taking into account relevant aspects of the regional (e.g. European) and global context. Studies of other climatic, societal or regional contexts may also be relevant, if they generate knowledge of well-motivated relevance to the evidence-based management of Swedish ecosystems, or to the fulfilment of Sweden's international commitments in related policy areas.

BECC is organized in Challenge Themes (“Theme” for short), each relating to a Grand Challenge with regard to the impacts of climate and environmental change on biodiversity and ecosystem services, and the ability of society to adapt to the impacts, or mitigate their causes. Each Theme thus focuses on an overarching issue of scientific importance, in need of scientific coordination, with high relevance to decision making and with potentially high impact on international research, today and in coming years.

The main applicant must be a BECC PI and be employed as a teacher (associate senior lecturer, lecturer, or professor) or be a permanently employed researcher. A list of PIs is available here. There can be up to two co-applicants and their roles should be clearly described. An applicant may only apply for one proposal as main applicant and one other as co-applicant. The allocation of grants at UGOT will be split between 2020 and 2021 while LU will use unspent government appropriations and therefore be allocated during 2020.
 

Instructions

1. First page: project title, names of main applicant and co applicant/s and a project summary (max 200 words).
2. A scientific description of the research project (max 5 pages, 12 point text) including a clear aim and description of how the project will be carried out that also describes cooperation and division of responsibilities of involved research groups, and project budget.
3. Minimum sum for each application is 400 000 SEK and maximum 1 000 000 in total. Examples of eligible costs are salary funding/co-funding for researchers/postdocs/PhD-students, running costs, infrastructure, and other costs related to the specific research project.
4. Grants: applied and obtained ongoing relevant grants should be presented so that the operation of the proposed project is apparent and potential synergies with the proposal are explained.
5. CV should be attached for main and co-applicants and follow the form of FORMAS. The list of publication should include the 10 most relevant articles and a link to the complete list (applicants from LU should refer to their LUCRIS page and from UGOT to their GUP page).

Assessment

Eligible applications by BECC PIs will be evaluated by the BECC board on the basis of:

• Scientific quality. Only applications of highest scientific quality will be supported. The application shall describe a project that can be achieved within the frame of two years of financing.
• Relevance in relation to BECC’s Research Strategy 2020-2025 and to the development of BECC´s Themes).
• Degree of synergy between different research areas of BECC, i.e. collaboration spanning more than one research group, department, faculty and/or university, with clearly defined added value from the collaboration.
• The applicant’s/s´ scientific merits.
• Adequate resources to carry out the project (e.g. external funds sufficient to support project operation).
• A credible plan for dissemination of results, adapted to the research conducted.

Application

Announcement of call: 15 January 2020
Final day of application: 6 March 2020
Decisions are expected to be taken during mid June 2020. OBS been postponed due to current situation

Proposals should be sent to BECC research coordinator, Josefin Madjidian, Josefin [dot] madjidian [at] cec [dot] lu [dot] se, who also provides information on the application procedure.

The 30th of January there was an information meeting and brainstorming around the call, please find the presentation around the call