Opportunities for investigation of neurobiology and changing ecosystems specifically cover modulatory, homeostatic, adaptive, and/or evolutionary mechanisms that impact neurophysiology in response to anthropogenic environmental influence. To address an unmet need, a focus on fundamental basic research topics in cell and circuit-based approaches is required, rather than on environmental sustainability applications, ecological impacts or human health outcomes – which, while critical, are being addressed through other funding mechanisms.

With this Dear Colleague Letter (DCL), programs in the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Directorate for Biological Sciences' (BIO) Division for Integrative Organismal Systems (IOS) and The Kavli Foundation's Neurobiology and Changing Ecosystems Initiative encourage submission of research proposals that advance the field of neurobiology in changing ecosystems during fiscal year 2024 (through September 30, 2024). The opportunity described in this DCL encourages proposals that emphasize interdisciplinary collaborations and integrate diverse methodologies, including environmental monitoring techniques, behavioral and physiological experiments, ecological and evolutionary modeling, combined with traditional approaches in neuroscience investigation.

NiCE proposals should explicitly address the following three criteria:

• The importance, extent, or urgency of the anthropogenic environmental change being investigated.
• The relationship between the neural mechanisms under investigation and the organism's fitness in the changing environment.
• How the results of the project will inform or predict resilience in related neural mechanisms, organisms, or environments.