IAVS members may apply for financial support to participate in an annual meeting of IAVS. Moreover, European Vegetation Survey (EVS) members, that are IAVS members, may also apply to the hybrid event in Madeira 2024 for presenting only at EVS sessions. These funds are very limited, and the Global Sponsorship Committee (GSC) will work with the local Organizing Committee to set criteria and administer the application process.

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• Applicant must be a member of IAVS, even if applying for EVS sessions alone, and give an oral or poster presentation at the symposium. If you are not a member yet, you can join at the IAVS Membership Page (reduced and free membership is available for persons with financial constraints).

• The applicant can be a student or researcher.

• Only 70% of the total approved funding will be sent to the applicant who:

       1) has already received a grant either for the IAVS Symposium, or to an EVS Conference, in the past two years and applied again, or:

       2) is from a high-income country (check here for current definitions of high-income countries used by the IAVS).

• Evaluation by committee members is based on a) motivation letter (+CV) and b) abstract. The evaluation is done on scale 0 (poor) to 5 (excellent).

• The final evaluation is including also professional age criteria: graduate (MSc or PhD) student = 5, post-doc = 4, researcher/professor/other = 2. This will be added to the table in the end.

• The final calculation is based on the average from abstract + motivation letter/CV + professional age, with the following weights: abstract 2/5, motivation & CV 2/5, professional age 1/5.

• The awarded budget is not based on the budget requested by the applicant, but on the budget estimated by GSC committee (estimated cost of flight ticket, early bird registration fee, budget accommodation – 1 person budget hotel room nearby the conference venue). Conservative criteria are applied: the applicant will not get a budgeted allocation that she/he did not request (e.g. if accommodation was not requested in motivation letter, it would not be awarded); on the other hand, if applicants requested a lower amount for an expense than we estimate the true cost to be (e.g. for accommodation), we use our estimate to make the award comparable to that received by others. Also, GSC does not support fee for social events (e.g. conference dinner) and pre- or post-symposium excursions.

• The total award (after discounts) should cover at least the price of the registration fee.

Our mission is to offer sufficient support to attend the Symposium to as many applicants as possible. Since the budget provided by IAVS is limited, we spend considerable time to do the evaluation in order to fair selection. Any budget, not used by individual awardee, will be used to support other applicants, either the same or next year. Please, do not apply for the travel award in case you do not necessarily need it. Also, if you manage to solicit funding from other sources (other foundation, institutional money, grant project) and you do not need the travel award (or a part of it) anymore, please inform the chair of GSC about this situation as soon as possible. This can be done both before the date of the conference, but also after it (before issuing the reimbursement). Double reimbursement of the same cost from different sources is considered as unethical behavior and will be investigated by Ethical Committee of IAVS, with possible consequences for the awardee (e.g. cancelling the reimbursement order and prohibiting the person from applying the IAVS travel awards in the future).

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