Collaborative Research: Belmont Forum Collaborative Research: BIOrepositories build Adaptive and Resilient Capacity (BioARC)

This award provides support to U.S. researchers participating in a project competitively selected by a 55-country initiative on global change research through the Belmont Forum. The Belmont Forum is a consortium of research funding organizations focused on support for transdisciplinary approaches to global environmental change challenges and opportunities. It aims to accelerate delivery of the international research most urgently needed to remove critical barriers to sustainability by aligning and mobilizing international resources. Each partner country provides funding for their researchers within a consortium to alleviate the need for funds to cross international borders. This approach facilitates effective leveraging of national resources to support excellent research on topics of global relevance best tackled through a multinational approach, recognizing that global challenges need global solutions. Working together in this Collaborative Research Action, the partner agencies have provided support to foster global transdisciplinary research teams of natural, health and social scientists and stakeholders from across the globe to improve understanding of climate, environment and health pathways to protect and promote health. The projects will provide crucial new understanding into the health implications arising from the impacts of climate change and variability on; 1) decision-science approaches to adaptation and implementation, 2) food, environment, and biological security and 3) risks to ecosystems and populations. This award provides support for the U.S. researchers to cooperate in consortia that consist of partners from at least three of the participating countries to increase our knowledge of the complex linkages and pathways between the climate, environment and health to help solve complex challenges that face societies. The BioARC project seeks to develop an interdisciplinary network of scientists, health professionals, and stakeholders to build the missing physical, human, and material infrastructure to stop pandemics at their source. These various forms of infrastructure will be centered on the development of multiple in-country biorepositories spread throughout The Americas, where pathogens with pandemic potential (e.g., Zika, Andes Virus) and neglected tropical diseases (e.g., Dengue, Chagas, and hookworm infection) have previously emerged and spread. This new infrastructure will provide the critical spatial, temporal, and taxonomic sampling and associated informatics necessary to understand the role of environmental drivers in host-pathogen dynamics, enabling a more proactive and predictive approach to pathogen emergence. This project directly addresses a critical challenge to pandemic preparedness. COVID-19 directly illustrated the high costs of pandemics to human wellbeing and the persistent gaps in our approach to preventing pathogen emergence. As humans and wildlife increasingly share space, opportunities for spillovers grow. Additionally, environmental stresses can cause wildlife to shed pathogens more readily as stress induced by things like habitat loss, heat exposure, or food scarcity decreases immune functionality that would typically keep pathogen shedding low. The project will focus on improving biorepository infrastructure including equipment and databases. The project team will develop training modules on museum science, fieldwork, molecular genetics, informatics, geospatial data analysis, science communication, and interdisciplinary network development. The project will develop best practices for biorepositories and relational databases for pathogens, interdisciplinary workflows for wildlife pathogen surveillance, communication across One Health disciplines, and strategies for biorepository decision-maker coordination. The goal of developing best practices is to enable the standardization of procedures for similar efforts locally and globally, and to form the foundation for an early-warning system for zoonotic diseases that will improve U.S. national security and build the U.S. workforce. The project will reduce costs of outbreak response by creating the capacity and data to establish baselines for wildlife pathogen dynamics, detecting deviations from these baselines, informing models, and enabling timely biosecurity decisions. The project will develop a robust, enduring system to safeguard human and animal populations from infectious diseases. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.