Dear Colleagues,

What an opportunity we have. The National Sea Grant College Program has just released three funding opportunities to support research and industry engagement to advance U.S. aquaculture. With your help, we want to put Maine’s best foot forward! The intent of these opportunities is to build on recent NOAA investments and tap the aquaculture expertise in the Sea Grant network. The details for each of the three opportunities are delineated here:

  1. Advanced Aquaculture Collaborative Programs

$9,000,000 - LOI April 15, Full May 15

2. Exploring New Aquaculture Opportunities

$1,500,000 - LOI March 26, Full April 24

  3. Social, Behavioral, and Economic Research Needs in Aquaculture

$3,000,000 - LOI April 2, Full May 1

We have also just learned about these opportunities and want to communicate our interests and the process. As directed in the first two FFOs, we are required to take leadership for submissions under opportunities 1 and 2. We are willing to be involved in proposals to the National Sea Grant Office under FFO #3 if our participation could be of benefit, but will focus our efforts on developing strong submissions for the first two.

The Collaborative Program and New Opportunities calls require Sea Grant Program leadership and submission. Neither of these calls is intended to support a single, discrete research project. As outlined in the FFOs, they are intended to be broader projects that may involve research, but also require industry involvement, outreach and extension components, and increase the capacity of the Maine Sea Grant Program to support ongoing and future research, extension, and science communication activities related to aquaculture. As such, based on our current bandwidth, for each of the programs our current intentions are:

• Collaborative Program:

• We intend to submit two Letters of Intent

• Both programs will be led by Maine Sea Grant and will include the addition of a full time extension professional dedicated to this collaborative program (building capacity)

• While topical details will be worked out over the next couple of weeks, we anticipate

• Focusing on research priority areas identified in the 10-year NOAA Sea Grant Aquaculture Vision document, and more recent network-wide planning initiatives

• Forming a transdisciplinary team including industry, other local and state partners, and researchers from multiple disciplines

• The maximum allowed budget for this opportunity is $1.2M, for a project period of up to 3 years, and it will require 50% non-federal match in each year

• New Opportunities Program:

• We intend to submit up to five Letters of Intent

• These submissions should be extension-oriented and should include some level of funding for extension professionals dedicated to the program (building capacity)

• While topical details will be worked out over the next couple of weeks for these NEW high-risk, high-reward ideas in underexplored areas, we anticipate both:

• Identifying specific areas of interest to our current extension programming and collaborations

• Soliciting ideas from industry members and other collaborators and partners that would benefit from our extension professional’s involvement and coordination

• The maximum allowed budget for this opportunity is $100,000, for a project period of up to 2 years, and it will require 50% non-federal match in each year.

The National Sea Grant Office will be providing further guidance to state Sea Grant programs during a webinar on Monday, 4 March at 3:00 PM EST. If you would like to participate in the webinar, please register or join using this link

Once we receive that additional guidance we will establish a more explicit process for deciding on proposals that will move forward to the national office from the Maine Sea Grant Program for FFOs 1 and 2.

In the meantime, please look through these FFOs and think about topic areas and how you may want to be involved.

Gayle Zydlewski

Director

ME Sea Grant College Program