The Seed Money awards issued by the GBIF Secretariat are a mechanism to facilitate the initiation of international collaborative projects and activities which are often difficult for local or national governments to support. These awards are small grants that are given as supplements to projects compiling taxonomic or species occurrence data and making it available to the world via GBIF.

The last call for these awards was in 2005:

• In previous requests the main target was to maximize cost-effectiveness and to obtain the largest additions of enough quality to the GBIF Network for the least amount of money. However, in this call the efforts has been focused on precise taxonomic groups where digital data is needed for specific international initiatives, whose objectives are not affordable from a local or national point of view. Some examples could be the International Pollinator Initiative, the Global Strategy for Plant Conservation or the Convention on Biological Diversity's (CBD) 2010 Biodiversity Target.
   
• There was a single call for both 2005 and 2006.

In the sections below the specific conditions for each of these requests are displayed.

Due to the limited resources available in the global context to digitalize and georeference natural history collections, and being one of the goals of GBIF to promote the initiation of international collaborative projects, in 2005-2006 request for proposals of DIGIT work programme, the projects related with the following groups of organisms has been priorized:

• APOIDEA: within the framework of the 'International Pollinator Initiative'.
   
• TRITICEAE: related to the international efforts to conserve plant genetic diversity
   
• CYPRINIFORMES as indicators in support of monitoring biodiversity change in freshwater ecosystems.
   
• AMPHIBIA: in support of the 'Global Species Conservation Assessment for Amphibians'.

To discuss which groups should be priorized, GBIF Secretariat and DIGIT work programme committee hosted a two week electronic conference in May and June 2005, whose results can be reviewed here.

There was only one deadline to submit full proposals: November the 15th, 2005. If you have any doubts related to this request, you can contact Larry Speers, the DIGIT Programme Officer.

All the information related to this DIGIT request for proposals can be reviewed in the GBIF Secretariat information portal:

http://www.gbif.org/prog/digit/HTML_Page1119970092

Also in the scope of the Electronic Catalogue of Names of Known Organisms are the resources very limited, and it is GBIF goal to promote the initiation of those international collaborative projects that face targets impossible to approach from a local or national point of view. So in this 2005-2006 request for proposals of ECAT work programme some projects were priorized, above all those related with the following topics:

• POLLINATORS: within the framework of the 'International Pollinator Initiative'. Projects had to be related with the development of catalogues for taxonomic groups in which pollinating organisms predominate and which are not already covered by taxonomic databases that are made available to the GBIF Network.
   
• GLOBAL STRATEGY FOR PLANT CONSERVATION, where three large groups have been priorized: Asteraceae (Compositae), Malvaceae (including Tiliaceae and Sterculiaceae) and Metastomataceae (Note that there is already a GBIF project developing an Asteraceae check-list for Europe and North Africa, and won't be further funded).

To discuss these priorities, GBIF Secretariat and ECAT work programme committee hosted a two week electronic conference in May and June 2005, whose results can be reviewed here.

There was a first deadline to submit pre-proposals: September the 15th, 2005. Selected pre-proposals had to submit their full proposals before November the 15th, 2005. If you have any doubts related to this request, you can contact Per de Place Bjørn, the ECAT Programme Officer.

All the information related to this ECAT request for proposals can be reviewed in the GBIF Secretariat information portal:

http://www.gbif.org/prog/ecat/seed_money/2005-06/ECATrfp.htm

The information about 2004 DIGIT awarded projects and 2004 ECAT awarded projects is available at the GBIF International Secretariat website:

Or you can check the information gathered about Spanish projects in the projects section of GBIF.ES website.