• do you study some aspect of biology (defined as anything from the molecular to ecosystem levels)?,
• do you intend to submit a proposal to NSF someday?
•  If you answered yes to these questions, then the probability is high that this pertains to you (though the details of what I say below may differ depending upon the Division you tend to apply to).

Anyway, we’ve covered the basics of this shift here before, but this week the DEB (Division of Environmental Biology) at NSF conducted a webinar on the changes and a few additional pieces of info were added.

Some important additional pieces of info

1)The following solicitations are NOT impacted by the preproposal rules:

Assembling the Tree of Life, CAREER, Dynamics of Coupled Nautral and Human Systems, Dimensions of Biodiversity, Ecology of Infectious Disease, OPUS, RCN, and the DDIGs.

What does that mean? 1) Those solicitations are operating under their own rules, so read their solicitations for details of how to submit and 2) submitting to them won’t count against your 2 preproposals per year limit.

2) Timeline (for DEB, supposedly IOS – Integrative Organismal Systems – will be similar):

Preproposals: due Jan 9, Preproposal review panel meetings March-April, Invite/Not invite decision by May 1(ish).

Full proposals (for those invited): Due Aug 2, Panel Review Oct/Nov, Award/Decline decision by December. In theory this will give you close to a month to revise your preproposal.

3) The webinar provides info on what should be in a preproposal, what the panel will be asked to assess, and what the basis for invite/not invite will be. I recommend perusing through the last few slides (see links below). There is a lot of emphasis (in my opinion) on how bold, compelling, general the research will be. If this is how the panels will be instructed, I think this is a good thing – but again that’s just my opinion.

4) There is also info on trends in funding rates, proposal submissions, and numbers of reviewers that were being required for all the proposals. If you’ve been submitting to NSF you know things have been grim, but there’s something about seeing the numbers that make you realize that regardless of whether you think this is the best change, things really had to change.

If you’d like to see the webinar here are some links for you (I tried the ‘streaming’ one and it worked fine, there is an executable that will be downloaded to your computer to run it)

Streaming recording link: https://mmancusa.webex.com/mmancusa/ldr.php?AT=pb&SP=MC&rID=43949312&rKey=2ad726bf2f77bd13

Download recording link: https://mmancusa.webex.com/mmancusa/lsr.php?AT=dw&SP=MC&rID=43949312&rKey=1fe4937906efe109

1) Preproposals: we will now need to submit a preproposal before we can submit a full proposal. Preproposals will be 5 pages, 4 of which are for the science/broader impacts. These preproposals will be considered by a panel and full proposals will be solicited for a subset of those preproposals. No full proposals can be submitted unless solicited by NSF****.

2) fewer full proposal deadlines:  The early year proposal deadline has been converted to a preproposal deadline so there is now a deadline for preproposals (January) and one later in the year for the solicited full proposals (August).

3) limits on submissions: the NSF info says, “In a given year, an individual may participate as a PI, co-PI, or lead senior investigator of a subaward on no more than two preliminary proposals submitted per Division solicitation (DEB or IOS).” I suspect from the wording that it is 2 total – regardless of how many different panels you want to submit to. Does anyone have more info on this?

NSF has highlighted the following as part of their motivation:

1) focus on transformative science. In their FAQ, NSF specifically highlights that they expect that the Preproposals panel will focus on how interesting and important the research is since obviously preproposal methods will be limited.

2) higher funding rate for full proposals. Also in the FAQ, NSF is aiming at a 25-35% funding rate for full proposals. For the youngsters, funding rates at least for the panel I tend to submit to have been in the range of 8-10%, so this will be a substantial improvement. However, this means that the rejection rates for the preproposals will be high.

The next year or two as we transition to the new process are going to be rocky. Some of my colleagues think these changes are akin to the 4 horsemen of the apocalypse running across the scientific landscape.  I think there are some critical issues with respect to currently untenured faculty, and funding gaps for projects that were planning on having 2 submissions before funding runs out. But, assuming that we are able to get feedback on rejected full proposals in time to write revised preproposals for the next round, I’m actually cautiously optimistic that there will eventually be some benefits to this system. I’ve read some of the concerns on other blogs and I would recommend that our readers go check them out. One of the reasons I am cautiously optimistic is that the old system was broken and some of those concerns were unofficially being built into the old system anyway*****. The truth is that our funding world has changed and we all (NSF, scientists, and university tenure committees) need to figure out how to make our current reality work. NSF is trying to adjust, scientists are being forced to adjust, and I think those of us with tenure need to make sure our universities are also adjusting so that the young people coming up through the new reality don’t get screwed****** because the system has changed on them and we haven’t adjusted our expectations*******.

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* DEB (Division of Environmental Biology) and IOS (Division of Integrated Organismal Systems) are divisions at NSF and cover pretty much everything from organismal physiology to ecosystem ecology. Incidentally, MCB (Division of Molecular and Cellular Biosciences) is/has also adopted the new system.

**Panel, n. 1) a program (in the generic sense, not the computer sense) to which unsolicited proposals on a certain research area (e.g., Population and Community Ecology, Ecosystems, etc) could be submitted twice a year. 2) a group of scientists invited to NSF to provide funding recommendations on proposals submitted to that panel.

***Full proposal: This involves a 1 page Project Summary, 15 page Project Description, Budget and Budget Justification, 2-page CV for each PI and co-PI, Lists of current and pending funding for each PI and co-PI, Data Management Plan, Cited Literature, and Postdoc mentoring plan (if you are going to fund a postdoc).

**** There are exceptions to this: CAREER, OPUS, RCN, LTER (i.e., pretty much anything with its own acronym except LTREB).

***** For example, proposals were being held by NSF until after the next deadline unless you specifically bugged your program director for it and then sometimes is was released with very little time before the deadline. I suspect it was only a matter of time before they refused to release them at all before the next deadline. The fact that it’s a deadline (i.e., late submissions rejected) and not a target date (i.e., acceptance or rejection of late submissions at the discretion of the program director) was also a relative recent change and indicative of where things were heading.

****** New system or old system, the fact is that 8% (or whatever the new number will be – though it’s hard to imagine it’ll be a LOT better) is horrid and frankly a lack of successful NSF funding is NOT indicative of quality or long-term prospects when percentages are that low. We need to make sure that productive people who have not landed the ‘gold standard’ grant are not being flushed out of the system.

******* This one’s just because I find the long string of astrixes (astrices?) funny.

1)      Pick a strategy. Some years I choose to focus on a specific concept or research area to learn a lot about a breaking area of ecology in a short period of time (like the year a majority of what I saw had the word ‘metacommunity’ in the title). Some years I choose breadth because I want to have a better feeling for where the field in general is going or to look for interesting new ideas (one year I saw talks that spanned from theory to empirical and from physiology to ecosystems – ah that was a fun year). The point is, decide what you want to get out of ESA before you go because once you get there, there’s a lot going on.

2)       Find a conference buddy (or buddies). You can’t see everything, but if you coordinate with a friend then you can hear about twice as much as you can see. It helps with processing talks and keeping them from just blending together. It also has the added benefit of giving you someone to talk to regularly and keeping you from feeling like just another faceless cog in the giant ESA machine.  Ethan and I often use this strategy, especially when there is more than one really interesting talk at the same time. Then we get together afterwards and swap stories. Just a piece of advice: make sure your conference buddy either has a good memory or takes good notes. I’m not pointing fingers or anything, but there’s nothing more frustrating than giving a detailed rendition of the talk you saw, asking about the talk they saw that you really want to know about, and getting, “It was really good. Uh, my notes here say they did something with a neutral model and the results were really compelling. The paper’s coming out soon. “

You’re only loosely affiliated with Jabberwocky Ecology, right now.

Ouch. But not untrue, sadly. While I have had some grandiose plans for things to post on, I have been sadly remiss in my duties here. So, today when I saw that a friend had emailed me about her new blog adventure, I decided this was an excellent opportunity to get back on the horse (or at least remind myself what a horse looks like!). So here it goes:

An interdisciplinary program called PIBBS (Program in Interdisciplinary Biology and Biomedical Sciences) at the University of New Mexico has launched a blog. BioBlog stories from the field and lab serves as an outlet for students and faculty associated with the program to explore the interface between their experiences in science and outreach to a broader public. The blog starts with a bang with the inaugural piece by Jim Brown (Distinguished Professor and Member of the National Academy of Sciences, not the recently departed soul singer or the famous former football player), “Human ecology, political correctness, and Orwell-speak” which explores the interface between science and political agendas.

This is followed up by a number of great posts, of which some of my favorites include:

Money, Genes and Identity by Sierra Netz, a graduate student at New Mexico, exploring her experience working at customer services for a genetic testing company and what it told her about the general understanding and emerging role of genetics in the broader public.

What’s in a name, by Felisa Smith, Director of PIBBS and Associate Professor, on the the fun insights that can be gained from scientific names

Teachable Moments, by Julian Davis, graduate student at New Mexico, exploring the use of everyday moments to explain biology to her children.

Go over, enjoy the posts, and welcome some more biologists to the interwebs!

Themes where we seek postdoctoral and/or PhD applications:

THEME 1 – MACROECOLOGIST/BIOGEOGRAPHER. Postdoc applications.

THEME 2 – SPECIES DISTRIBUTION MODELER. Postdoc applications and PhD stipends.

THEME 3 – PHYSICAL OR PALEO OCEANOGRAPHER . Postdoc applications.

THEME 4 – PLANKTON ECOLOGIST/BIOLOGICAL OCEANOGRAPHER. PhD stipends.

THEME 5 – CLIMATE CHANGE BIOLOGIST. Postdoc applications.

THEME 6 – FISHERIES ECOLOGIST/FISHERIES OCEANOGRAPHER . Postdoc applications and PhD stipends.

THEME 7 – FISHERIES/BIOLOGICAL OCEANOGRAPHER. Postdoc applications and PhD stipends.

THEME 8 – EVOLUTIONARY BIOLOGIST. Postdoc applications.

THEME 9 – HISTORICAL BIOGEOGRAPHER. Postdoc applications.

THEME 10 – BIOSTATISTICIAN/STATISTICAL BIOLOGIST. Postdoc applications.

THEME 11 -MIGRATION BIOLOGIST / ORNITHOLOGY. PhD stipends

THEME 12 –MACROECOLOGY OF VECTORBORN DISEASES . Postdoc applications.

THEME 13 – ENVIRONMENTAL ECONOMIST). PhD stipends.

THEME 14 – CONSERVATION ECOLOGIST/COMPUTATIONAL BIOLOGIST. Postdoc applications.

THEME 15 – NATURE RESERVE SCIENTIST. Postdoc applications.

THEME 16 – CONSERVATION SCIENTIST. PhD stipends.

Fuller descriptions of individual positions within 16 themes are at www.bio.ku.dk/om/jobs. Application must be based on the full description of the positions, and submitted before 31 of October 2009. For enquiries about the program, contact Professor Carsten Rahbek, crahbek@bio.ku.dk.

1) Better reviewer databases: I say no a lot to reviews because I say yes a lot to reviews, not because I lack a sense of scientific responsibility. The Chronicle blog (by a sociologist) points out that the number of members in the American Sociological Association is more than enough to support a reasonable number of reviews/person. However, a much smaller number of people seem to be shouldering the load. I suspect the same is true for ecology. So why is this? Undoubtedly the journals are right that there are curmudgeons who simply refuse to review. But I also suspect that editors are busy people like the rest of us and when we are busy we go with the names of people who come to mind quickly; these “go-to” people are “the most obvious people” to review a paper or give a talk.  However, those go-to people are often the same for many people – resulting in the smaller number of people getting a higher load of review requests. As a reviewer I try to help with this situation by recommending people I think are not yet “in the system” (post-docs, young assistant professors, etc), but I might humbly suggest that journals invest in better reviewer databases to help editors come up with a better diversity of names.

2) More editorial control: My next two suggestions are not going to make me popular with either authors or editors. And I know (if they got implemented) I would occasionally get hoisted in my own petard, but I strongly believe that with the demands journals are making on reviewers theses days (thorough reviews, lots of reviews, quick reviews) journals have a responsibility to protect reviewers from superfluous reviews (i.e. unnecessary review requests).

a)  Better pre-review vetting. Many authors will hate this because this means one person is probably deciding whether or not to send something out for review. A bad draw on an editor (who has a strong personal opinion on the validity/novelty of your work) can kill your submission. However, I am not alone in having received manuscripts for review that are so poorly written that they are in effect incomprehensible or so far from the journal’s standard that clearly no editor looked at the manuscript before sending it on to me. I’m not talking about borderline cases but manuscripts so bad I barely know how to review them. As a reviewer this just makes me mad and takes up valuable time that could have been dedicated to a manuscript that actually deserved consideration. As the Chronicle post, points out: manuscripts do not have a fundamental right to be reviewed.

b) Stop looking for reviewer consensus. I have noticed a trend at certain journals: manuscripts keep being sent back to the reviewer until the reviewer “signs off” on the manuscript. This is consistent with the idea in the Ecology Letters article that authors are needlessly lengthening the review process by ignoring reviewer comments. As much as we may all wish otherwise, not all reviewer comments reflect absolute truth. We all have our opinions on things that (if we’re being honest with ourselves) actually are in gray areas. Sometimes reviewers just flub things. And, journals are right, sometimes reviewers give shoddy reviews. As both a reviewer and an author I recognize this. As a reviewer, I assume the editor will read my review (and the paper) and decide for his or herself whether they agree with my opinion. As an author, I assume that the editor will read my response to a reviewer and decide whether my objections to a certain critique have merit. As a reviewer, the only time I want to re-review a paper is if I have labeled my concern as “fatal” and the editor is uncertain whether the authors have either dealt with that concern or have a valid argument for why it is not a concern. In a world where reviewers are scarce, manuscripts should only go back to reviewers when absolutely necessary. This requires editors to insert themselves more into the process than perhaps they have been accustomed.

Maybe journals and editors already feel like they do these things. I don’t know. I do know I feel like I already do the things they want me as a reviewer to do! However, given how widespread concern over the strain on the peer-review process is, it seems to me that perhaps it’s time for a real dialogue – and that involves both sides talking about their perspectives and  making suggestions about how to improve things. Anyone out there have additional ideas for things that could be done?

What caught my attention in this episode, however, was the assumption that, in alternative universes, not only would human beings exist, but I would exist. Having chosen the ecology path, this immediately got me to thinking about evolution. “Replaying the tape of earth history” has long been a thought experiment in the study of evolution. If we reran the history of life from the beginning, what would life look like right now – 4.54 billion years after the formation of the earth? The crux of the question is: how random is evolution? On the extinction side one could ask questions like: Would catastrophes that occurred in the past have the exact same impact on life on earth? Or would subtle differences in timing and conditions of the event or the activity of individuals lead to survival of species that otherwise went extinct – thus altering the web of species’ interactions and evolutionary potential of earth’s biota? On the evolution side: are key mutations and innovations inevitable (i.e. would they occur again if the tape was replayed) and if so, would they occur at the same instance as they did the first time? How would changes in the probability of a mutation occurring again and the timing (occurring sooner or later than it did before) affect how evolution played out? If certain types of mutations are more probable to occur than other types of mutations, and those mutations were key in evolution of life, then perhaps evolution is something more deterministic than a pure random walk through DNA space. Since microevolution is not my field of expertise, I’m not qualified to say. I don’t even know if anyone has tried to address the probability of  specific mutations occurring but I suspect that there is more that is random in evolution than predictable. If so, then if we were able to study Earth in the alternative universes, I think I would find that most of them were not populated with copies of me. (In addition to the issue of whether there are human beings on those alternative Earths, there is also the issue of whether all my ancestors actually hooked up again or decided to mate with someone else.) However, for those of you who are really bummed by this idea, I have a ray of hope. The physicists kept talking about an “infinite number of alternative universes”, and when you talk about infinity…well, a small probability multiplied by infinity is technically, I believe, infinity (have to admit that makes my brain hurt), so you probably do exist in alternative universes.

The high school sci-fi fan in me has obviously already imagined a branch of ecological and evolutionary study which uses alternative universes as independent experiments of evolution. Imagine what we could learn. Is DNA the only molecule that could code information stably? Or are their alternative universes where all life on Earth has RNA as its genetic code or even some other molecular structure? How important is the identity of species that go extinct to the overall history of evolution (does the loss of a specific small mammal during the K-T extinction prevent the Age of Mammals? Or does it only result in minor or even no differences in the overall diversification and dominance of mammals that occurred after the demise of the dinosaurs? Inquiring minds want to know. And who knows, maybe in an alternative universe we have already learned how to do this and I never had to make the choice between ecology and astrophysics and I’m currently busy using my knowledge of the multiverse to study ecology and evolution. I just hope that my alternative self is a little better at math!

Unlike Cadotte, my work is not specifically mentioned in the article. I’m grateful for this because I already have some recruitment issues. It is not uncommon for me to have to reassure prospective graduate students that they are not automatically expected to work with rodents if they join my lab. And let’s face it, as the Popular Science article clearly shows, working with rodents – referred to as small mammals when you want it to sound better and never never ever as vermin – does have an image problem. Given the image problem, you may wonder why I was surprised that small mammal handling was listed as one of the worst jobs. Let’s just say that I don’t consider getting to go here:

And work with these:

to be any kind of hardship. You may also be wondering right about now about those students who join my lab who perhaps were not initially thrilled with the idea of working with “vermin” – what happened to them? Through fair means or foul, I do encourage all my students to go down to the field site to “just gain the experience”. They don’t have to handle rodents, all that is done by the trained graduate research assistant. All they have to do is help set traps and record data. Unanimously, undergrads and grads, come back loving the experience. So far they’ve even all ended up developing research projects on small mammals. If you’re suspicious, well, you’re welcome to tag along sometime. We always have room for one more vermin handler down at Portal.