British Ecological Society - Long-term research Grants

Overview

Objectives

• This grant will provide a small amount of funding each year for 10 years to enable existing short-term projects with at least 1-2 years of data to be funded into the long term, where there is likely to be great benefit from growing and developing this dataset over the longer term.
• The aim is to establish a new portfolio of long-term experiments/datasets with real relevance to issues of today.
• These grants can fund projects such as ecological restoration, habitat creation, control of alien species and climate change anywhere in the world.
• It will fund the annual cost of a few days of data gathering over a long period of time.

Eligibility and conditions

• Must have BES membership.
• These grants are open to all types of ecologists including conservation practitioners, e.g., Reserve Managers and consultants, as well as university academics.
• Long-term research grants are awarded to individuals, not organisations.
• Applicants are responsible for obtaining all relevant permits and permissions required to undertake the proposed work.
• If you are awarded a Long-term Research grant, you can still apply for other BES grants in future rounds.
• Failure to submit a satisfactory report at the end of a grant will mean the grantee is ineligible to apply for further grants.

Project succession and location criteria

• If you can no longer continue your project, you will need to arrange the project handover to an eligible ecologist. This will need to be discussed with the BES grants officer.
• A succession plan for changes in circumstances will be part of the application process.
• They strongly encourage that you pick a site that is local to you or, if further afield, can be reached by sustainable transport options. If the latter is not feasible, hiring someone to carry out the research in the location you are interested in will be an acceptable cost.

Value

You will be able to claim the first five years’ worth of funding in year 1, which is £3,500.

You will need to show in your application how this money will be used each year.

It is intended that you will carry out one to two days’ worth of data collection each year with the funding provided, which averages £500 a year, with the additional £1000 reserved for year 1.

For example, year one may have higher expenses due to purchasing equipment, while subsequent years will have lower costs.

Upon providing a satisfactory report after the initial five years, in the sixth year, you can claim an additional £3,500 to cover new or replacement equipment costs and data collection for the remainder of the grant period.

It is a condition of all grants that the BES  contribution is acknowledged in any publication or publicity that may arise from this study. Please notify them of any publications supported by this funding.

Examples of what the funding can cover include:

• Equipment.
• Software for analysis of results.
• Travel, accommodation and subsistence.
• Hiring a person for 1-2 days each year to facilitate data collection if the location is not local to the project investigator. Evidence must be provided to show that a fair wage is being paid if hiring a person to carry out research in an area not local to you.

Ideally, projects will become self-sufficient in the long term following initial BES funding.

The grant can not be used to cover your own time.