Living organisms underpin our food, climate stability, and materials – ecological collapse threatens the foundations of civilisation. By pairing advanced monitoring with resilience-boosting interventions, ARIA’s new Engineering Ecosystem Resilience programme aims to seek ways to halt biodiversity loss and enable people and nature to thrive.
ARIA are now looking to develop an ambitious research programme within this space. To help guide our thinking and shape the programme’s development, we are looking to fund around 10 3-month exploratory projects with up to £20,000.
ARIA welcome proposals that:
- Dive deep on research directions relevant to the Engineering Ecosystem Resilience opportunity space. Exploration should be oriented by a combination of your scientific interests and backgrounds, and the needs of programme development efforts.
- Explore technical feasibility, risks, identify gaps and opportunities in the opportunity space.
- Identify and explore ethical, governance and community engagement needs and concerns
We expect proposed projects to take one of the following tracks (your proposal should clearly indicate your track):
- Projects whose main work substrate can either be literature and reports (scientific, technical, ethical, social sciences), or
- Projects that propose to explore a particular new data set or technique that has the potential to create novel insight.
We also expect successful applicants to spend part of their time:
- Producing and reviewing short reports on key topics.
- Participating in cohort-level round table discussions to challenge each other’s thinking.
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ARIA welcome proposals from across the R&D ecosystem, including individuals (including those not affiliated with an organisation), universities (including proposals from students, postdocs and staff), research institutions, small, medium and large companies, charities and public sector research organisations.
We’re looking for applicants that:
- Have the ability to clearly express their ideas – and to constructively consider diverse opinions.
- In most cases pause their regular work activities for the duration of the project.
- May have backgrounds in conservation, ecology, evolution, gene engineering, ethics, or synthetic biology.
- Can be at any career stage with at least several years of post-MSc-equivalent work experience and achievements (i.e., they may be 2+ years into their PhD, or have been working for a conservation organisation for several years; they may also be much further along in their careers).
If you are an overseas applicant you should note that our primary focus will be on funding those who are based in the UK or those willing to conduct the majority (> 50%) of the project from the UK. In exceptional circumstances, funding can be awarded outside the UK if we believe the proposed project can significantly benefit the UK.
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The guidance below is to help you assess whether your proposal aligns with the scope of this funding call (this is a non-exhaustive list):
In scope:
- Analysing existing (published or unpublished) data with a new approach, or a novel clearly defined hypothesis.
- Synthesising/reviewing work in a specific scientific, technological, or ethical area relevant to the opportunity space (e.g., evaluating the effectiveness of various established or potential biodiversity conservation interventions).
- Running study groups or surveys to understand stakeholder perception of ecosystems, resilience, or potential ecosystem-support interventions.
- Testing whether a new technology can be applied to a particular study system i.e., generating “proof of concept” pilot data that could underpin a new type of species support intervention or large-scale proposal.
- Theoretical modelling or simulation work that connects to real ecosystem systems and resilience questions (e.g., impact of assisted migration).
- Novel literature synthesis that generates new frameworks, identifies gaps, or challenges existing paradigms in ecosystem resilience.
- Work that challenges the thinking we outlined in our Opportunity Space document.
- Social science research examining community engagement, stakeholder perspectives, or governance approaches for ecosystem interventions.
Out of scope:
- Refining or improving an existing analysis or product.
- Generating a new RNAseq or eDNA dataset for my study system.
- Purchasing new equipment for long-term field data collection.
- Routine monitoring or data collection without novel analytical approaches.
- Standard conservation practice implementation (e.g., traditional habitat restoration without technology components).