Request for Proposals

General Guidelines - Regional Research Projects

The Northeast Region of Sea Grant includes the programs in Connecticut, Maine, New Hampshire, New York, Rhode Island, and in Massachusetts, the MIT and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution programs. All are part of the National Sea Grant College Program, administered by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA.)

Regional projects bring together investigators from multiple states in the Northeast and are targeted at these four regional cross-cutting issues: community-based natural resource management, the future of coastal communities, sustainable seafood, and stewardship through citizen science. Principal Investigators from both the natural and social sciences are invited to address these issues. The goal is to provide information useful to decision-makers and to citizens affected by those decisions. Priorities for project proposals at this time are:
  • Area-specific ecosystem management, including social and environmental aspects
  • Natural resource economics, governance, and other social themes related to community inclusion in natural resource management
  • Strategies for improving community resiliency to coastal hazards
  • New tools for assessing, maintaining, and developing coastal access
  • Ecologically sustainable nature-based tourism
  • Commercial and recreational fisheries, including collaborative research with fishermen
  • Role of Marine Protected Areas in sustainable management of fisheries
  • Multi-trophic-level aquaculture
  • Technologies and methodologies for environmentally sustainable aquaculture

Funding

Each state will grant funds to the PI or Co-PI from their own state; therefore, total funding for a Regional Project is the sum of the grants given by the Sea Grant Programs in each of the states involved. MIT Sea Grant will fund Regional Projects at the same rate as Core Projects.

Project Duration

Regional projects last for up to two years. The PI is required to submit a project timeline as part of the proposal process.

A Massachusetts researcher who wishes to lead a Regional Project should use MIT Sea Grant's forms and instructions for preparing his/her pre-proposal. However the pre-proposal must be submitted to all Sea Grant programs in each state involved in the proposed research, and must be received by the required due date of each program. In the Full Proposal phase, the PI should adhere to the deadlines, forms and procedures of MIT Sea Grant alone.