The National Science Foundation did more than just clip the wings of Virginia Tech associate professor Ashley Dayer when it canceled her $1.5 million grant examining bird feeding.
Dayer, acknowledging what she called “shock, frustration, stress and grief,” said the April 18 grant cancellation amounted to a false economy.
“There is nothing efficient about this,” Dayer said Friday. “We had spent years and over a million dollars designing this study and collecting data. Now we have lost funding for analysis and sharing of results.”
Dayer described her work as a “participatory science project” involving thousands of bird-feeding volunteers. According to the grant abstract, more than 57 million U.S. residents are involved in feeding birds, which can “impact the number and diversity of birds, increase the number of predators in an area, and increase disease transmission among birds” as well as influence “mental well-being” among humans.
