12 Projects Secure NSF Funding to Promote Inclusive Geoscience Research

The National Science Foundation has selected 12 research projects for funding under its Geosciences Open Science Ecosystem program promoting inclusive access to geosciences’ resources, such as data, physical collections, software and advanced computing. 

Geared at advancing geosciences education and research, the program has allotted a total of $10.4 million to the projects divided into two tracks of six projects each. 

The Track 1 awards are early-stage GEO OSE research, including two-year capability-building activities, while Track 2 covers large-scale projects to develop and deploy accessible and sustainable GEO OSE resources, the NSF said Friday.

The program’s administrator is the NSF Directorate for Geosciences’ newly formed Research, Innovation, Synergies and Education division, advocating the expansion of information resources and computing capabilities to tackle interdisciplinary geoscience research questions.

The Track 1 activities include research by the University of Colorado Boulder, the Smithsonian Institution and Arizona State University on enhancing community-driven information ecosystems to improve paleontology researchers’ access to millions of fossil specimen records.

The University of Texas at Austin and Virginia Tech are partnered in one of the Track 2 projects, with their research focused on cloud-based open science solutions to curate and analyze geomaterial image data.