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Hi Gordon
As someone with a long standing involvement in studying Diptera and interest in promoting dipterology in Thailand I may be able to make a few constructive comments on your proposal.
Permission to work in Nat Parks is very difficult but not impossible to obtain but it helps to be ‘established’ as an authority in your field and are far more likely to succeed if you have Thais as collaborators. Perhaps after completing your Lanna project you will be better positioned?
Re. Your proposal. Firstly, the title is very grandiose... running a few traps in the grounds of a university in Chiang Rai does not constitute a survey of Lanna Biodiversity! I suggest you tone it down a bit.
Secondly, your proposal is too anecdotal; hit them with hard facts, defined objectives and clear deliverables. What you are doing is in effect offering to manage a project in which you(?) will sample and sort material, deliver this to specialists who will then report back to you their findings. You will then report these in summary to the University etc. You need to specify a structure for managing this.
In your Introduction you talk about how Thailand’s biodiversity is underworked and how understanding it is important. Why not refer to their obligations under CBD or cite some of the many Governmental papers on the issue (do this gently as Thais don’t like farangs telling them how to suck eggs). The country’s dipteran diversity may be poorly known but the list does include c1000 species and there are / have been / are planned several large initiatives and a growing number of papers on the fauna. Summarise succinctly (in formal scientific prose) all that is known and provide a list of references at the end. You can then say where you project fits into the greater scheme of things.
In describing the nuts and bolts of the Project I think you need to say more about how / when / where the traps will be run; how will they be serviced etc. (if you can involve students from the University you will most certainly earn brownie-points from those evaluating your proposal).
As currently drafted I think your proposal has two fatal flaws which you need to think about. The first one is where will types and other material be deposited? Thailand has a long history of being ‘robbed out’ by visiting entomologists from the ‘developed’ world and they are well aware that consequent lack of access to reference and type material is severely hindering their own efforts to evaluate their biodiversity and develop taxonomy. They wish to correct this situation. You need to insist that types (at least holotype and some paratypes) and some of the identified voucher specimens are repatriated into either the National Invertebrate Collection at QSBG or into the University collections in Thailand or perhaps the new National Museum (but this is largely a vertebrate collection). This will not only make you proposal more politically acceptable to the Thai’s but also makes good sense as collection facilities in Thailand are now up to the job.
The second major problem is demonstrating how you will coordinate and control the many specialists you have gathered to support the Project. Bitter experience shows that many would-be collaborators actually get involved in such projects merely to build their collections rather than to work actively on the material (and I am NOT saying that this is the case with any on your list of collaborators but there have been ‘issues’ in the past). You will need to impose conditions on collaborators to ensure that they comply with the conditions you define. This is actually quite easy:- all you need is a brief agreement for them to sign stating type policy etc and agreeing that all specimens are labelled as ‘’property of CRU to be returned there’’ or something similar. You should require collaborators to report back to you (say on a yearly basis) so that you can send the University a coordinated summary of progress periodically. You should specify this agreement in your proposal
I hope this helps a little. Please get back to me by e-mail if you’d like to discuss any of this. And, I’d certainly be interested in looking at any Empidoidea (especially Empididae, Hemerodromiinae and Hybotidae, Hybotinae & Ocydromiinae) to complement my own ongoing studies
Cheers
Adrian