Cooperative Agreement G22AC00531

This $300,000 award from the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) under the Agriculture and Food Research Initiative (CFDA 10.310) will fund the development and field testing of elite poplar tree varieties with reduced lignin content for more sustainable and efficient wood fiber production. The project aims to establish a short-rotation agroforestry system utilizing these genetically engineered poplar trees with enhanced traits for increased pulp yield and reduced carbon...

This National Science Foundation (NSF) Biological Sciences (CFDA 47.074) project grant, awarded to the National Center for Genome Resources (NCGR) in Santa Fe, NM, provides $1,346,558 over 4 years to develop a modular software tool that will enable the identification of genetic diversity in plants critical for climate adaptation. The project aims to create computational methods and machine learning algorithms that can analyze pangenomes, functional genomic data, and phenotypic data to connect...

This $100,000 Project Grant award, funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) Division of Environmental Biology under the Biological Sciences CFDA program, will support research to improve the representation of plants in ecosystem models. The key products and services to be delivered under this 3-year award include: Investigating methods to estimate plant traits using evolutionary histories to improve the parameterization of vegetation hydraulic traits in hydrologic and ecosystem models....

This $649,806 project grant from the United States Department of Agriculture National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) Agriculture and Food Research Initiative (AFRI) program (CFDA 10.310) will fund research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison to develop methods for enhancing the success of tree seedling transplantation in reforestation projects in the Midwest United States. The University will establish a network of public tree nurseries to study the relative impacts of nursery...

This award from the National Science Foundation's Division of Environmental Biology supports a research project at Purdue University to investigate the genetic basis of how organisms adapt to their environment, including the role of non-additive genetic effects. The $198,915 Project Grant, awarded on September 15, 2023, will fund research using a unique set of genetic resources to quantify the contribution of non-additive effects on survival and seed production in the model organism...

This $451,139 Project Grant award from the National Science Foundation (NSF) Biological Sciences (CFDA 47.074) program supports the development of a new biotechnology called Transposase-Assisted Homology-Independent Targeted Insertion (TAHITI) for intragenic genome engineering of plants. The research aims to improve crop traits like disease resistance and yield by precisely inserting DNA sequences sourced from the same plant species, rather than relying on transgenic approaches that introduce...

This National Science Foundation Project Grant award of $500,611 provides funding from January 1, 2023 through December 31, 2025 to support research into the mechanisms of altitudinal range expansion by plant species under the Biological Sciences program (CFDA 47.074). The University Enterprises Corporation at California State University, San Bernardino will analyze historical and contemporary plant samples to elucidate patterns of adaptation that have allowed the model species Arabidopsis...

This Cooperative Agreement award from the Bureau of Land Management's (BLM) Plant Conservation and Restoration Management program (CFDA 15.245) provides $197,063.86 to New Mexico State University (NMSU) to analyze the genetic and functional trait variation of an important upland restoration grass species in New Mexico. The key objectives are to use expert advice to inform genetic and trait sampling and analysis, and collate the data into an open access database. This will inform how to produce...

This four-year, $643,306 project grant from the National Science Foundation's Biological Sciences program (CFDA 47.074) will fund research into alternative leaf water use strategies employed by plants in hot environments. The grantee, Desert Botanical Garden Inc., will quantify alternative water use behavior across diverse species to determine how common it is for plants to prioritize leaf cooling over photosynthesis when temperatures are high. The research aims to improve modeling of vegetation...

This $419,230 five-year project grant from the National Science Foundation Division of Environmental Biology, under the Biological Sciences program (CFDA 47.074), will evaluate the contribution of sensory drive to the divergence of flower color in plant species. Led by Clemson University researchers, the project aims to understand how flower color may evolve differently between populations without major shifts in pollinator species by studying populations of Phacelia dubia, a bee-pollinated...