The U.S. National Science Foundation is an independent federal agency that supports science and engineering in all 50 states and U.S. territories. NSF was established in 1950 by Congress to promote the progress of science, advance the national health, prosperity and welfare, and secure the national defense.
The grant program aims to enhance understanding of how organisms respond to climate change by integrating studies of organismal mechanisms with eco-evolutionary approaches. It encourages proposals that predict and mitigate the effects of a rapidly changing climate on Earth's living systems. Specific focus areas include integrating physiology and genomics into species distribution models, understanding plastic responses to climate change, functional genomics of organism response, the impact of biological interactions on these responses, and improving predictions of biological and global resilience. The solicitation supports cross-disciplinary, convergence research that links adaptive and maladaptive responses to climate change with their eco-evolutionary dynamics and encourages use-inspired applications to tackle societal challenges related to climate impact on organisms across various scales and biological hierarchies. Proposals that fail to bridge disciplinary divides, lack a mechanism-focused approach, or do not involve organismal mechanistic insights with eco-evolutionary consequences beyond the individual level, or lack a plan for use-inspired applications of foundational research, are advised against submission to this solicitation.