The UW Consortium for Extension and Research in Agriculture and Natural Resources (CERANR) is making available approximately $100,000 for faculty and staff-led cooperative research for new projects for eligible faculty and staff located at UW-Madison, UW-Platteville, UW-River Falls, and UW-Stevens Point for fiscal year 2010-11.

Applications for funding must include at least one UW-Madison faculty member and a faculty member from at least one of the non-Madison CERANR represented colleges or schools as collaborators. Principal Investigators must be budgeted with PI status in the agriculture or natural resource units represented in CERANR. CERANR units include:

• UW-Madison, College of Agricultural and Life Sciences
• UW-Madison, School of Veterinary Medicine
• UW-Platteville, College of Business Industry Life Science and Agriculture;
• UW-River Falls, College of Agriculture, Food, and Environmental Sciences
• UW-Stevens Point, College of Natural Resources

Faculty or staff who are not budgeted through a CERANR unit may be included as a co-PI when the proposal includes a CERANR-affiliated PI. Staff members with Principal Investigator (PI) status may apply for CERANR grant with the approval of their respective supervisor and dean. In addition, faculty/staff PI’s are encouraged to consider including county-based and non-integrated UWEX faculty and staff on projects as team members.

The Deans of the respective Colleges have identified critical state research needs, which are outlined below and in the Annual Call for Proposals.

Please submit proposals as a PDF document via email to the following email address; consortium@cals.wisc.edu at the UW-Madison, CALS Research Division by FRIDAY, JANUARY 15, 2010. Be sure to include the PDF of the signature page (with all required signatures).

CONSORTIUM RESEARCH PRIORITIES FOR 2010-11
The Agriculture-Natural Resource Consortium will continue to place emphasis upon specific research priorities as in past years. However, the Consortium also encourages submission of other proposals that address agricultural and natural resource issues of concern to Wisconsin.

This effort is designed for two purposes. First, the CERANR Deans wish to encourage cooperation and collaboration across institutions and disciplines to help develop synergistic and effective solutions to critical issues. Secondly, the funding is provided to help research cooperators to address critical, emerging and ongoing state research needs for issues that have an impact on our agricultural and natural resource systems.

Projects can be “pilot” in nature to help new or established researchers to collect data and/or demonstrate modest impacts that could lead to larger funded efforts with external funding. Or, they can be small-scale, well-defined projects where an impact is relatively certain but where a larger funded effort is not necessarily the ultimate goal.

The three (unranked) priority theme areas identified by the Consortium are: