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Dear Colleague Letter: Poorly Sampled and Unknown Taxa (PurSUiT)

Discovering the world's biota underpins the study of the origins, evolution, and maintenance of biodiversity. Yet despite centuries of exploration, our knowledge of the diversity of life is still temporally and spatially biased, and critical areas of extant and extinct biodiversity remain undiscovered or undocumented. This restricts our ability to develop a comprehensive and comparative evolutionary framework for all life and hinders our understanding of the mechanisms and processes of evolution.

To address this issue, the Division of Environmental Biology (DEB) in the Directorate of Biological Sciences (BIO) encourages the submission of proposals to the Systematics and Biodiversity Sciences (SBS) cluster (https://www.nsf.gov/funding/pgm_summ.jsp?pims_id=503666) to support research on Poorly Sampled and Unknown Taxa (PurSUiT). The PurSUiT category is meant to encourage biodiversity discovery and description in poorly known, or dark areas, of the Tree of Life. Its incorporation as a special category within SBS reflects a continued effort to close significant gaps in biodiversity knowledge.