Human-Environment and Geographical Sciences Program (HEGS)

The objective of the Human-Environment and Geographical Sciences (HEGS) Program is to support basic scientific research about the nature, causes, and/or consequences of the spatial distribution of human activity and/or environmental processes across a range of scales. Projects about a broad range of topics may be appropriate for support if they enhance fundamental geographical knowledge, concepts, theories, methods, and their application to societal problems and concerns. Recognizing the breadth of the field’s contributions to science, the HEGS Program welcomes proposals for empirically grounded, theoretically engaged, and methodologically sophisticated geographical research. National Science Foundation's mandate is to support basic scientific research. Support is provided for projects that are most effective in grounding research in relevant theoretical frameworks relevant to HEGS, that focus on questions that emanate from the theoretical discussions, and that use scientific methods to answer those questions. HEGS supported projects are expected to yield results that will enhance, expand, and transform fundamental geographical theory and methods, and that will have positive broader impacts that benefit society.

The HEGS Program recognizes that geography is a broad discipline that includes the natural sciences, the social sciences and the humanities. However, HEGS does not fund research that is solely humanistic, non-science. A proposal to the HEGS Program must explain how the research will contribute to geographic and spatial scientific theory and/or methods development, and how the results are generalizable beyond the case study. It should be noted that HEGS is situated in the Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences Division of the Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences Directorate at NSF. Therefore, it is critical that research projects submitted to the Human-Environment and Geographical Sciences Program illustrate how the proposed research is relevant and important to people and societies. A proposal that fails to be responsive to these program expectations will be returned without review.