Funding Type: Procurement
Project Size: Total project costs must range between £20,000 and £150,000, inclusive of VAT.
Project Goals:
- Accelerate the development of innovative solutions to enhance plant health and biosecurity.
- Projects can include establishing the feasibility of ideas, demonstrating principles, or developing prototypes.
- Solutions should qualitatively and quantitatively improve effectiveness or efficiency within plant health and biosecurity.
Focus Areas:
- Projects should address biological questions or apply bioscience or biotechnology for practical use.
- Demonstrate development and operational feasibility of innovative technologies or practices.
- Consider the needs of intended users, including collaboration and co-design with real-world users such as UK horticultural, forestry, agricultural growers, and importers/exporters of plants.
Portfolio Approach:
- A diverse range of projects across different technologies, costs, organisations, and challenge areas will be funded.
Challenge Areas: Projects must focus on one or more of these challenges related to regulated plant pests and diseases:
- Enhancing border inspections of traded plants and commodities.
- Improving in-land inspections in nurseries and the environment for pest and pathogen detection.
- Utilising passive and scanning surveillance approaches for timely, cost-effective pest and disease detection.
- Managing the supply of potentially infected or infested plants pre and post border.
Research Categories:
- Open to technical feasibility studies and prototype development and evaluation.
- Projects should engage stakeholders and can include prototyping, demonstrating, piloting, testing, and validation in real-life conditions.
Exclusions:
- Projects that are not original, in scope, or duplicate existing work.
- Projects lacking significant support from potential users or a clear route to operational use and commercialisation.
- Projects focused solely on training or those not addressing potential negative outcomes.
- Proposals already covered by existing commercial agreements.
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