31 NSF Grants Relevant to Ethno and Economic Botany
By Miriam Kritzer Van Zant
EBL searched NSF for ethnobotany and economic botany and found 31 grants which, from the titles, could be considered to have or be improved by an ethnobotanical or economic botany component. All of these grants were given under the program Human Dimensions of Global Change (HDGC) 1997. No more recent grants were found using ethtnobotany or economic botany as key words. But scrolling through the Biology '99 grants showed that under Ecology, grants were given for study of anthropogenic addition of nitrogen in an urban environment, sustainability of tropical tree plantations, and a few for study of agro-ecosystem and effects of pollution on ecosystems. Ecology also gave one grant to study accelerated phosphorous cycling in native Amazonian agroecosystems, and one to train Native North Americans in environmental biology. Ecological Studies gave one grant to look at "Human Settlements as Ecosystems" in Baltimore. Biotic Surveys and Inventories gave money to one joint effort with NIH for, "Drug Discovery, Biodiversity Conservation and Sustainable Development." Systematic Biology grant titles made no mention of the human/plant interface, but that does not eliminate relevance for ethnobotanical and economic botany purposes. It does reduce the likelihood of justifying basic systematics on a particular organism or taxonomic group for these purposes. The granting environment for Economic and Ethnobotany is improving, but there is still a long way to go.
For more information on the Human Dimensions of Global Change (HDGC) 1997 grants see: http://www.nsf.gov/sbe/hdgc/hdgc97aw.htm.
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Last updated: 24-March-2001 / du
