What's New: To receive these updates and announcements by email, manage your subscription, or review the mailing list archive, go to the NCSE List User Form. National Science Foundation Solicits Comments on Strategic Plan The National Science Foundation (NSF) is soliciting comments from the scientific community on a draft of its five-year strategic plan.  NSF Director Rita Colwell said, "The views of the science and engineering community and the public are very important to us and will be reflected in the final draft of the updated plan."   The draft NSF strategic plan for FY 2003-2008 is available online at www.nsf.gov.  Comments should be submitted to NSF at stratplan@nsf.gov by July 15, 2003.  In accordance with the Government Performance and Results Act of 1993 (GPRA), the National Science Foundation is required to update its strategic plan every three years. The NSF has three long-term strategic goals, expressed simply as People, Ideas, and Tools: People Goal - A diverse, competitive, and globally-engaged U.S. workforce of scientists, engineers, technologists and well-prepared citizens.   Ideas Goal - Discovery across the frontier of science and engineering, connected to learning, innovation and service to society.   Tools Goal - Broadly accessible, state-of-the-art science and engineering facilities, tools and other infrastructure that enable discovery, learning and innovation. The draft strategic plan retains and strengthens the People, Ideas, and Tools framework NSF introduced in its last strategic plan and adds a new strategic goal for Organizational Excellence, in keeping with the belief that achieving NSF's mission is impossible without sustained excellence in NSF's business processes. Environmental Research and Education.  The environment is one of seven areas discussed in the "situation analysis" in the preface of the draft NSF strategic plan:  Environment:  Environmental research and education are central elements of local, national, and global security, health, and prosperity, as is discussed in the recent report, Complex Environmental Systems: Synthesis for Earth, Life, and Society in the 21st Century, prepared by NSF's Advisory Committee for Environmental Research and Education. The world is also facing the prospect of rapid environmental and climate change and the complicated question of long-term environmental security. One of NSF's "investment strategies" is to identify and support priority areas in which to make a sustained level of investment - usually five years - to move research forward rapidly while training a new cadre of scientists and engineers who can transform fields and spur industrial innovation.  Biocomplexity in the Environment is one of six priority areas discussed in the draft strategic plan: Biocomplexity in the Environment (BE):  The BE priority area is a multidisciplinary effort that draws on new scientific and technological capabilities to investigate the interactions among biological, ecological, social, engineered and earth systems.  The primary goals are to: synthesize knowledge across disciplines; improve science-based forecasting capabilities for complex environmental systems; and advance a broad range of methods, tools, and infrastructure to support interdisciplinary activities. According to the draft NSF strategic plan, investments in priority areas are complementary to investments in core disciplines.  The core activities identify prospects for more intensive investment - the priority areas.  In turn, the priority areas lift the capabilities of the core disciplines, enabling them to strike out in new directions.

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