ABRS Advisory Committee Report on 2007–2008 Participatory Grants Program
Please note that grant applications must follow ABRS application instructions and guidelines
47 ‘fauna’ and 31 ‘flora’ applications (including the ABLO) were received by ABRS for consideration in the 2007 funding round, of which 26 were funded at least in part. The quality of applications and attention to detail continues to improve but the Research Subcommittee still has to deal with a number of applications that did not follow the instructions and guidelines. To assist future applicants, and to provide some background to the decisions made at the March 2007 meeting of the full Advisory Committee, the following information is provided on technical problems with applications and other major reasons for grants being unsuccessful. Note that in the latter category, some applications did not meet the criteria sufficiently to warrant funding while others were competitive projects but were ranked below the cut-off for available funds.
Technical Problems with Applications
The following are areas where applications have failed to meet ABRS Guidelines that may make an application ineligible for consideration:
- Relevance of project to National Research Priorities and ABRS objectives not articulated.
- Page limit exceeded or information not provided in required format.
- Applications not submitted in two documents as requested: i.e. the guidelines stipulate an application in one document (including CVs) and a summary in a separate document.
- Missing CVs of some joint investigators.
- Principal Investigator ineligible or not named.
- Lack of information about in-kind support from host institution.
Unsuccessful grants (met guidelines but not competitive)
Due to limited funding and our commitment to fund only high quality, relevant projects, even grants that meet the technical guidelines may not be successful. Some of the reasons for a grant being considered less competitive are:
- Molecular phylogenetic projects not including a component that contributes directly to the documentation of Australia’s biota.
- Not strongly supporting the National Research Priorities and ABRS objectives or not clearly linking the outcomes of the project to these goals.
- The project being outside the scope of ABRS or making only a marginal contribution to its objectives.
- Insufficient demonstration of necessary expertise and/or experience.
- The cost to benefit ratio being too great, or the project being poorly budgeted.
Other general comments
- Some missed opportunities for building in post-graduate training.
- Principal Investigators not including appropriate time component for themselves.
- Requesting significant resources for travel and fieldwork without considering (or explaining) other options for obtaining material (e.g. sourcing material from existing collections and/or colleagues).
- Methods for phylogenetic analysis inadequately described or, in some cases, out of date.
- Inadequate details of sampling intentions. This is required to evaluate both morphological and molecular studies with respect to the adequacy of taxon sampling and for determining the appropriateness of costing for travel and DNA sequencing.
- Not attempting to seek matching funds or in-kind support from other relevant agencies/organisations, particularly for projects that have a strong applied focus.
- Sometimes no indication of where collected material would be lodged.
- Applications that include Honours or PhD projects as part of a larger program not providing an effective description of the student’s project, to allow suitability of this component to be evaluated.
- To fulfil ABRS training requirements PhD projects need to cover generic skills in modern systematics.
- Participation of overseas expert needs to be justified (i.e. the absence of suitable expertise in Australia).
- Importance or relevance of taxon needs to justified with data and/or appropriate references.
- Methods insufficently or inadequately described, ‘routine taxonomic methods for this taxon’ is not sufficient.
- Absence of conceptual framework for taxonomic/systematic approach especially in relation to the identification of species boundaries using molecular genetic and phylogenetic methods.
- For studies utilising sequencing, sequencing costs should be given as $ per double stranded gene fragment.
Reduced funding
Applications are not always funded in full. Reduced grants may be necessary due to the demand for funding and the desire to support as many high quality projects as possible. Some items may be cut from a budget because they are unacceptable under the ABRS guidelines. In this year’s round, such cuts included the backfilling of investigator’s salary and on-costs above those specified in the guidelines.