News on successful proposals

 

Successful proposals are listed in the table below.  Follow the links for more information on particular projects. 

List of funded projects (2010, 2011, and 2013 calls)

Year (duration)	Principal investigator	Project title
2010 (1 year)	Zerbini	Threatened franciscanas: Improving estimates of abundance to guide conservation actions.
2012-13 (1 year)	Aguilar-Ramirez	Supporting the assessment of alternative fishing gears for replacing gillnets that cause bycatch of vaquita in the Upper Gulf of California, Mexico.
2011-14 (3 years)	Cerchio	Ecology, status, fisheries interactions and conservation of coastal Indo-Pacific humpback and bottlenose dolphins on the west coast of Madagascar.
2011-13 (2 years)	Collins	Abundance and distribution of the Atlantic humpback dolphin in Gabon and Congo, with a focus on improving field-survey methods and monitoring protocols.
2011 (1 year)	Danilewicz	Estimating abundance of an isolated population of the threatened Franciscana: moving towards conservation action.
2012-13 (1.5 years)	Minton/Peter	Monitoring and threat assessment of coastal cetacean populations in Sarawak, Malayisa.
2011-2013 (2.5 years)	Oremus	Genetic and demographic assessment of dolphins taken in live-capture and traditional drive-hunt in the Solomon Islands.
2011 (3 years)	Smith	Investigation on the population identity of Indo-Pacific humpback in the northern Bay of Bengal, Bangladesh, and implications for population-level conservation and taxonomy of the species.
2011-2012 (I year)	Turvey	Identifying conservation solutions for the Yangtze finless porpoise through community research.
2012-14 (2 years)	Wang	Photo-identification monitoring of the eastern Taiwan Strait population of Indo-Pacific humback dolphins.
2013-14 (1 year)	Chen	Defining the units of conservation and historic population dynamics for two small cetacean species affected by directed and incidental catches in the North Pacific.
2013-14 (1 year)**	Kelkar	Strengthening the meaning of a freshwater protected area for the Ganges River dolphin: looking within and beyond the Vikramshila Gangetic Dolphin Sanctuary, Bihar, India.
2013-14 (1 year)**	Mustika	A pilot study to identify the extent of small cetacean bycatch in Indonesia using fisher interview and stranding data proxies.
2014 (1 year)	Rajamani	Capacity building in conducting cetacean abundance surveys in south east Asia through a training workshop and actual surveys.
2013-14 (1 year)	Wakid	Investigating the distribution and abundance of dolphins in Indian Sudarban.
	Heinrich	First region-wide estimates of population size and status of endemic Chilean dolphins in southern Chile.
	Sanjurjo	Business model to save vaquita from extinction while improving fishermen livelihoods in the Upper Gulf of California
	Khan	Abundance Survey for Indus River Dolphin
	Lai	Online Information as a Tool to Improve Documentation of the Availability of Marine Mammals for Consumption and other Uses

** Given the amount of funds available in 2013, these selected projects were partially funded to an extent that still allowed them to achieve their main objectives.

Calls For Funding Proposals

The Small Cetaceans Fund is replenished on a voluntary basis thanks to generous donations from Governments and NGOs.  If sufficient funding is available, calls for proposals will normally be announced in years when the IWC biennial meeting is held (2016, 2018 etc).

In years where sufficient funds are gathered the following deadlines will be applied:

• Calls for projects published here: end of January
• Proposal submissions: end of February
• Proposal evaluations: March-May/June (depending on the dates of the IWC Scientific Committee meeting)
• Funding recipients pre-proclamation: end of Scientific Committee meeting
• Final decision on recipients: September (depending on dates of the IWC biennial meeting)
• Contract definition and signature: October-November
• Payment of first instalment: December-January

The awards process is Iengthy and cannot be reduced due to processes incumbent on the IWC which is an intergovernmental body. The Application Form can be found here (word document) or here (PDF) and Review Criteria can be found here.  More details on the selection process can be found below.

Preference will be given to projects in-line with the previously established priority topics and recommendations of the IWC sub-committee on small cetaceans.

In order to maximise the number of projects supported by this fund, proposals shall be considered on two tiers; small grants up to GBP 5000 and larger grants which shall be limited to a maximum of GBP 20,000.  Proposals for partially funded projects will also be considered.

Frequently asked questions on the application process can be found here.