2/4/97

To: ACCIS Participants

From: Larry Atkinson

Subject: Notes from recent IAI meeting of ISG I PI's.

On 1 and 2 February I participated in an IAI sponsored workshop in Long Beach, CA. The goal of the meeting was to faciliated collaboration between ISG's and promote interaction between PI's and the IAI administration.

Following are my abbreviated notes:

  1. Attendence - About 100 people came…many from Latin America. It seemed that all 37 ISG's were represented.
  2. Funding - It is VERY limited. Right now there is ca. US$2M anticipated for funding the ISG Phase II (the proposal we'll be preparing).
  3. Timing - Having our workshop later was a good idea as we will better know more about what IAI wants. Their plan is still evolving.
  4. Timing - We will receive the announcement for ISG II proposals in May-June.
  5. Fellowships and Postdocs - There are a growing number of post-docs and fellowships available. If you have a student or collegue that might benefit contact Paul Filmer at NSF or me.
  6. GIS - The Global Environmental Facility (GEF) project funded US$3M in equipment and training. Brazil provides a new GIS software package called SPRING. You are all welcome to use it.
  7. Initail Science Program Phase III - These are the small research grants. None of us has submitted on. Round three will be focussed on two areas: ENSO and biodiversity. I believe we should submit one anyway along the lines of data acquisition and analysis.

There will be US$1.2M for 9-14 awards.

Evaluation of the submissions will include:

Science excellence

Contribution to IAI network

Storng capacity building

Multi-national (MUST HAVE THREE COUNTRIES)

Mulit-disciplinary (MUST HAVE SOCIAL and ECONOMIC disciplines represented)

Must integrate.

  1. Start up grants phase II.

At this point they have US$2M/yr. In kind and cash match is encouraged. The review process will be as follows:

review by Peers

review by IAI Science Board

Directorate will review and may negotiate matching of proposals.

Directorate consolidates proposals into seven research centers and goes to the Conference of Parties for approval.

They are looking for a Jul/Aug 1997 submission meaning a May/June announcement

The process ends with IAI admin taking the package to the IAI Conference of Parties in May 1998 for approval.

They will prefer a Latin American PI but realize that may be difficult with financial accounting issues. Nevertheless include statement about this if necessary.

Other Projects in Austral Chile

As you know there are other projects in Austral Chile. They will all be represented at the Puerto Varas meeting. In the end we may decide to team up with some or all of them but we won't know that until later.