BIOTA Program sets out to attract more young researchers

At the evaluation meeting, the steering committee highlighted forthcoming challenges for the program, such as intensifying exchanges between research groups and building links with school teachers.

By Noêmia Lopes, in São Pedro (SP)

Agência FAPESP – Since its launch in 1999, the FAPESP Research Program on Biodiversity Characterization, Conservation, Restoration and Sustainable Use (BIOTA) has contributed to the education and training of 130 postdocs, 243 PhD holders, 326 holders of Master’s degrees, and 255 scientific initiation students. Currently, the program has 121 ongoing scholarships and 67 ongoing research grants from FAPESP alone.

“A veritable army of people have been trained in areas relating to biodiversity, but now we’ve reached a more constant level of scholarships and grants. In a way, therefore, we’re limited to already-established researchers, and we need to invite more young researchers to submit projects,” said Carlos Joly, coordinator of BIOTA, during the Eighth BIOTA Evaluation Meeting held on December 7-12 in São Pedro, São Paulo State.

The idea is that the growth of human resources, preferably driven by longer-term funding via thematic projects and the Young Investigators Awards, lasting up to four years, should be accompanied by increasing interaction with researchers affiliated with foreign institutions.

“We need to communicate with colleagues in Brazil but also with fellow-researchers elsewhere in order to attract promising youngsters and foster a growing exchange of ideas,” said Marie-Anne Van Sluys, a member of FAPESP’s Life Sciences Committee, during the opening session of the conference.

Bringing together different research teams was one of the aims of the conference, which was attended by undergraduates, principal investigators and members of the External Evaluation Committee, made up of internationally renowned researchers who assess the program’s progress at regular intervals.

“Many lines of thought are close, and dialogue can yield interesting results,” Joly said. “For example, during the event Professor Jérôme Chave, who heads the Amazon Biodiversity Laboratory (CEBA), a research station run by France’s National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) in French Guiana, expressed an interest in arranging an exchange of students from there with Brazilians who are studying the evolution of the Amazonian biota and the Atlantic rainforest in the framework of our partnerships with the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF). It’s opportunities like these that we want to explore in the coming years.”

Increasing internationalization, one of the priorities of the BIOTA Science Plan & Strategies for the Next Decade, is on the way to meeting the targets set in 2010. With the support of FAPESP’s Science Department, BIOTA’s steering committee has established partnerships and issued calls for proposals with NSF and the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC), the United Kingdom’s leading public funder of environmental science.

“One of BIOTA’s foremost achievements has been the active role it plays on the international stage,” Joly said. “Besides partnering with these other research funding agencies, we’re participating in task forces and working groups in the Intergovernmental Science Policy Platform on Biodiversity & Ecosystem Services [IPBES], as well as defining the scope of FAPESP’s calls for proposals with the Belmont Forum for biodiversity scenarios.”

Next challenges

The program will now seek closer ties with primary and secondary school teachers. In 2013 and 2014, the BIOTA Education Lecture Cycle offered students and teachers in primary and secondary schools a series of presentations on biomes and ecosystem services.

“The next step is to issue a specific call for proposals in education. We’ve been discussing this for over a year and plan to go ahead with execution in 2015,” Joly said.

Another front of interest is the interface between biodiversity and public health. Studies are already under way on disease vectors, but the program is looking for ways to promote more direct collaboration with the medical community.

With regard to research themes, the number of projects has decreased in certain areas, such as ecology and conservation of terrestrial invertebrates.

“Animals such as butterflies, bees and dragonflies are very strong environmental indicators. At the moment, we have few researchers whose work focuses on this, and we need to think of ways to encourage the submission of new projects,” Joly said.

Among the subjects to be explored is the reintroduction of wildlife. According to Joly, restoration of the arboreal component of riparian fringe forest, for example, is already well-established among the research teams, who know which species should be replanted and how to assure the genetic variability of plantings.

The reintroduction of animals is more delicate. For example, a large infrastructure is required to breed small rodents, pacas and agoutis, which do not all belong to the same genetically defined family, he explained. “Our research shows there’s no point in restoring the vegetation in an area and not having the disperser fauna that is essential to restore the dynamics of the vegetation. This is an important research area with daunting challenges. Should we use animals from different breeding stocks? Perhaps, but we don’t yet have the answers to this and other questions. We need to develop this research area quickly, as it will produce data that permit a step change in biodiversity restoration projects.”

Evaluation process

The Eighth Evaluation Meeting of the BIOTA/FAPESP Program covered the largest number of projects to date. “There were over 70, so during the year we held five preparatory workshops divided into thematic areas,” said Joly.

The workshops, which were held at FAPESP’s headquarters in the city of São Paulo, discussed terrestrial ecosystems, aquatic organisms, bioprospecting, microorganisms, vertebrates, invertebrates, and international cooperation projects.

Each workshop gave rise to a synthesis presented to the External Evaluation Committee at the event in São Pedro. “The syntheses gave us an excellent overview of the ongoing research projects. Our goal is to evaluate the program as a whole, but this format also benefited each project individually,” said Daniel Faith, principal research scientist with the Australian Museum (Australia).

After discussing the results and preparing a draft of the final report, the external evaluators met at FAPESP to share their first impressions with Hernan Chaimovich, special advisor to FAPESP’s Science Department.

“The program has made highly significant progress in terms of biodiversity. The next step appears to be integrating molecular biology, pharmacology and business,” Chaimovich said after the presentation.

Following this cue, the evaluators recommended the preparation of a portfolio of natural compounds with good potential for the manufacturing of new pharmaceutical drugs. The portfolio, with additional information on structures of the compounds and the potential target diseases, should also function as a business plan. The idea is to consult world leaders in the area, asking them to analyze the discoveries with the best chances of success and suggest ways of developing them with industry.

With regard to the scientific performance achieved since the last evaluation, the committee was impressed by the results. “Looking at the 2010 strategic plan, good progress has been made on all five of the program’s main objectives and most of its 13 priorities,” said Faith.

“One of the suggestions I made in the last evaluation of the program was to include a marine component, which is now consolidated and brings a new perspective to BIOTA,” said Ronald O’Dor, a researcher with Dalhousie University (Canada).

“This evaluation process has a special feature not present in previous evaluations,” Joly said. “This is the first balance sheet we’ve drawn up of projects approved after the renewal of FAPESP’s support in 2010. In other words, it’s a chance to see how well we’re progressing toward the goals set by the 2020 strategic plan.” The next evaluation meeting will take place within two to three years.

Courses and lectures

During three days of the five-day meeting to evaluate BIOTA, students in scientific initiation, Master’s and PhD programs were able to attend four thematic mini-courses: Introduction to SINBIOTA 2.1; Practical aspects of mass spectral interpretation with ionization by electrospray and MALDI and application to natural product metabolism analysis; Introduction to the use of Program R; and The use of DNA barcoding in fungal taxonomy and systematics.

The students also had an opportunity to find out more about the research lines pursued by the external evaluators, who delivered presentations on their research on December 7-9.

Among the lecturers, David Newman from the National Cancer Institute (USA) and Raymond Andersen from the University of British Columbia (Canada) spoke about the importance of natural products to the discovery of new medical drugs and described their research in the field. Faith presented his method of study in phylogenetic diversity and extinction probabilities.

O’Dor explained the workings of the Ocean Biogeographic Information System (OBIS), which enables users to find information on marine species in all oceans and is currently being used in research relating to fish migration in the Amazon and PIRATA, a collaborative program involving Brazil, the United States and France that maintains an array of oceanic buoys to monitor the upper ocean and atmosphere of the tropical Atlantic.

BIOTA program

The aims of BIOTA, which is about to complete 15 years, are to understand the processes that generate, maintain or reduce biodiversity and to organize biodiversity data and make these data available to public policy makers and society in general.

Since 1999, the program has applied for five patents and published 1,490 articles including papers in high-impact journals such as Nature and Science. It has its own online journal, Biota Neotropica, as well as the Bioprospecta bioassay and bioprospecting network, the SINBIOTA database, and a quarterly newsletter.

In the area of public policy, BIOTA has helped the government of São Paulo State formulate and upgrade legislation on environmental conservation in the form of normative acts, resolutions and decrees based on the discoveries of researchers involved with the program.

For more information on the BIOTA program, visit: www.fapesp.br/en/4662 and www.biota.org.br.