Experiment Challenges

Request For Experiments


Rivers, Deltas, and Estuaries

Categories

Rivers, deltas, and estuaries are important as biological ecosystems as well as civilizational infrastructure. Similarly, understanding these systems is important for both human and planetary health. 


Challenge Amount:
$5,000
Submission Deadline:
Feb 25, 2021
Campaign Launch:
Mar 25, 2021

How this works

This grant is for projects that launch crowdfunding campaigns by Feb 25, 2021 and will be distributed proportionately to according to the schedule below. Eligible projects must be approved before the launch deadline.

Learn more

Learn more about Experiment challenges on the challenges main page.

Challenge Aims

For the amount of space they take up (less than 1% of earth's surface), rivers account for a disproportionately large percentage of biodiversity. They are important homes and corridors of species and nutrients. They're also important to humans and civilization. They provide water for irrigation and drinking. They sustain transportation and recreation. They can also be important sources of hydroelectricity. A changing climate increases our need to better understand and monitor these environments. 

We encourage researchers of either the human or environmental aspects of rivers, deltas, and estuaries to apply to this Challenge Grant.

About Experiment

Experiment is the largest crowdfunding platform for scientific research with a funding success rate of 44%. Experiment's mission is to democratize the research process and remove barriers to scientific success. The average budget of a successful proposal is $4,000. For more information on the Experiment process, please refer to our Researcher Guide: https://experiment.com/guide

The call for proposal will last from now until February 25th, 2021. Proposals should be submitted directly on the Experiment site at experiment.com/grants/rivers Early submission is strongly encouraged. Early submissions will have more opportunity for feedback and coaching.

Proposals submitted for the call will be approved or rejected by March 24th and launched on March 25th for a 30 day campaign. Projects will be promoted by Experiment and allied organizations. Researchers should expect to spend time weekly during the campaign working outreach. Coaching for outreach activities will be provided by Experiment staff. Past experience shows that projects whose proponents and research team mount a strong outreach campaign are most successful.

During the campaign participants will be expected to share the projects with their networks to attract support. 

Read carefully: The Challenge Grant prize of $5,000 will be distributed to all participating and eligible projects in proportion to the number of backers accumulated by April 21st (at 5pm PST). To further clarify: on April 21st, projects will receive as an extra bonus a share of the $5,000 prize according to the number of project backers compared to the total number of backers in the competition. For example, suppose Project A has 40 backers, and a total of 500 backers chose to donate across all the projects (including Project A). Project A would then receive a share 40/500 of the $5,000 prize = 0.08*5,000 = $400.