Funding opportunity

Funding opportunity: Future of UK treescapes

UKRI (NERC, AHRC and ESRC), Defra, Welsh government and Scottish government invite proposals for grants as part of the Future of UK treescapes programme.

The call will support grants that address one or more of the programme’s themes:

  • theme one: forms, functions and values of UK treescapes
  • theme two: opportunities, barriers and pathways for expansion of UK treescapes
  • theme three: resilience of UK treescapes to global change.

Proposals are expected to take an interdisciplinary approach bringing together environmental scientists, social scientists, economists and, arts and humanities researchers to form substantial research collaborations.

Proposals that only involve collaboration between researchers within the remit of a single research council are out of scope.

Standard eligibility rules apply but, in addition, collaborations with Forest Research (FR) are permitted under this call.

If such a collaboration is recommended for funding, Department for the Environment Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), Welsh Government and Scottish Government will fund the FR component whilst NERC, AHRC and ESRC will fund the other, eligible organisations.

See the announcement of opportunity for how to apply with FR collaborators.

There is up to £10 million available from NERC, AHRC and ESRC for this call with additional funding from Defra, Welsh Government and Scottish Government for FR collaborations.

Individual proposals may request up to £2 million (80% full economic cost) over 36 months. It is expected that up to six proposals will be funded.

All projects must start by 1 August 2021.

Programme webinars

UKRI (NERC, ESRC and AHRC), Defra, Scottish government and Welsh government held a programme webinar for potential applicants on 20 October 2020. This enabled applicants to learn more about:

You can hear the recording of the webinar here (Use passcode yN9@+7cj)

Additional programme workshops were also held to explore opportunities for arts, humanities, economics and social science within the programme and how AHRC and ESRC communities can collaborate with environmental scientists to develop interdisciplinary proposals.

AHRC hosted two online workshop sessions on 8 and 13 October 2020.

These sessions provided an overview of the Future of UK Treescapes programme and recently announced call for proposals. There was an introduction from the newly appointed programme ambassadors, as well as two presentations from stakeholders:

Session one provided an overview of the programme, see the recording of the webinar (Passcode: 6M&LYJaj).

View the presentations from the webinar:

ESRC also held a workshop on 20 October.

Collaborator finder

In conjunction with the webinar and workshops, the funders are launching a ‘collaborator finder’. This short survey provides a platform to help researchers and stakeholders interested in developing a proposal for submission to the funding call to find and contact potential collaborators and project partners.

Information provided will be shared by email as a password protected PDF with all participants in the survey following the second AHRC workshop and again following the ESRC workshop and programme webinar. Those interested should therefore complete the survey as early as possible and by 14 October 2020. The final date for completing the survey is 23 October 2020.

Potential applicants can also contact the programme ambassadors to discuss what support they can offer in helping to identify potential collaborators (treescapes@glos.ac.uk).

All personal data provided via this survey will be processed in accordance with current UK data protection legislation. Details can be found in the guidance notes and on the UKRI privacy notice.

How to apply

You must apply using the Joint Electronic Submission system (Je-S).

See the announcement of opportunity for full details of the call and how to apply.

Contacts

For further details, please contact Lucy Hopewell at uktreescapes@nerc.ukri.org

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