Slots: 1.
Deadlines
Internal Deadline: Monday, April 4th, 2022, 5pm PT
LOI: April 19, 2022
External Deadline: June 16, 2022
Award Information
Award Type: Grants / Cooperative Agreements
Estimated Number of Awards: 3 – 5
Anticipated Award Amount: It is anticipated that award sizes may range from $2,000,000 per year to $5,000,000 per year. The amount requested for each year of the five-year project may vary within these limits.
Who May Serve as PI: Individuals with the skills, knowledge, and resources necessary to carry out the proposed research as a Principal Investigator (PI) are invited to work with their organizations to develop an application. Individuals from underrepresented groups as well as individuals with disabilities are always encouraged to apply.
Link to Award: https://science.osti.gov/-/media/grants/pdf/foas/2022/SC_FOA_0002581.pdf
Process for Limited Submissions
PIs must submit their application as a Limited Submission through the Office of Research Application Portal: https://orif.usc.edu/oor-portal/.
Materials to submit include:
- (1) Single Page Proposal Summary (0.5” margins; single-spaced; font type: Arial, Helvetica, or Georgia typeface; font size: 11 pt). Page limit includes references and illustrations. Pages that exceed the 1-page limit will be excluded from review.
- (2) CV – (5 pages maximum)
- If submitting on behalf of a multi-institutional team, please use the ‘Letter of Support/Other’ field at the end to upload a document listing collaborators and their affiliated institutions.
Note: The portal requires information about the PIs and Co-PIs in addition to department and contact information, including the 10-digit USC ID#, Gender, and Ethnicity. Please have this material prepared before beginning this application.
Purpose
The DOE SC Program in Biological and Environmental Research (BER), Earth and Environmental System Sciences Division (EESSD) hereby announces its interest in applications from the scientific community for Urban Integrated Field Laboratories (Urban IFLs) that will improve the science underpinning our understanding of climate and environmental predictability across complex and variable urban regions. EESSD supports fundamental systems level research aimed at identifying the foundational principles of dynamic physical, biogeochemical, and human processes and interactions and advancing fundamental understanding of the predictability of the climate and broader Earth system. EESSD develops the science, technology, and knowledge base that is necessary to inform actions to enable the resilience of natural-human systems that are exposed to climate trends, variabilities, and extremes.
The objective of the Urban IFL program is to advance the science underpinning our understanding of the predictability of urban systems and their two-way interactions with the climate system, in order to provide the knowledge and information necessary to inform equitable climate and energy solutions that can strengthen community scale resilience across urban landscapes. The Urban IFLs will pursue the fundamental scientific understanding necessary to inform the design, development, financing, and deployment pathways of technical solutions that promote social equity and enhance urban resilience in response to the climate crisis.
An Urban IFL must be focused on an urban region within the United States or one of its territories and must have all the following characteristics:
• The Urban IFL emphasizes the basic sciences of climate, environmental, ecological, and urban change affecting heterogeneous urban regions, yet with a view towards informing sustainable, resilient, and equitable solutions. The program will give special consideration to science that addresses the climate change impacts affecting under-represented and/or disadvantaged communities.
• The proposed urban region is unique yet exhibits some climatic, demographic, or other similarities to other US urban regions, i.e., such that other similar urban regions will be able to learn from science success stories from the urban region that contains an IFL.
• The Urban IFL research combines new observations with high resolution and highly detailed urban modeling, where data generated by observations and models are used for scientific analysis.
o While the new observations will be expected to improve understanding of atmospheric, ecological and/or environmental processes unique to urban region(s), the applicants will also be encouraged to leverage federal, state, and other existing observations and observing networks, including crowd-sourced information.
o The modeling component must be at a high enough resolution and detail to adequately represent distinguishing features and changing dimensions of heterogeneous communities (e.g. the people, built and natural environment, infrastructure, resources, and socioeconomic components) across the urban region. The modeling component must furthermore be capable of being nested within and/or forced by a regional to global climate system model, in order to adequately represent future climate variability and change across urban regions.
• The IFL provides opportunities to inspire, train, and support leading scientists from a variety of institutions, including minority-serving institutions, who have an appreciation for the global climate and energy challenges of the 21st century.
• The Urban IFL science plan includes significant research efforts addressing all three required Research Focus Areas (defined below) and integrates knowledge and effort across them.
An Urban IFL must have significant research efforts addressing multiple science themes and is expected to be structured around the three specific Research Focus Areas
Research Focus Area 1: Spatial variabilities across the greater urban regions and how the variabilities exert influences on local micro-climates and micro-environments affecting urban communities.
Research Focus Area 2: Observing and modeling biogeochemical cycling and atmospheric composition in urban systems.
Research Focus Area 3: Towards quantifying the benefits of equitable solutions that are applied to heterogeneous urban regions in addressing the climate crisis.
An Urban IFL research team should be comprised of diverse institutions, which could include DOE/National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) National Laboratories1, academic and non-profit research institutions, other federal agencies, and/or the private sector. However, the lead organization must be an academic institution or a National Laboratory.
Visit our Institutionally Limited Submission webpage for more updates and other announcements.