Recipient Organization
UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS
2001 S. Lincoln Ave.
URBANA,IL 61801
Performing Department
Animal Sciences
Non Technical Summary
The National Animal Nutrition Program (NANP) (i.e., NRSP-9) serves as a forum to identify high-priority animal nutrition issues and provides an integrated and systemic approach to sharing, collecting, assembling, synthesizing, and disseminating science-based information, educational tools, and enabling technologies on animal nutrition that facilitate high-priority research among agricultural species. As such, the overarching objectives of NRSP-9 include:a. Support research efforts that enhance the sustainability, competitiveness, and profitability of U.S. agriculture by providing easily accessible and publicly available resources applicable to, and essential for, animal nutrition research.b. Expand and enhance shared multispecies databases that can be integrated across species to ensure sufficient data are available to enable animal nutrition research aimed at improving human, animal, and environmental health.c. Identify gaps within animal nutrition research that address global challenges such as adapting to and mitigating climate change; ensuring a safe, secure, and abundant food supply; heightening environmental stewardship; and improving human health, nutrition, and wellness.The Overarching Hypothesis is that providing easily accessible and publicly available resources applicable to, and essential for, animal nutrition research will result in: 1) an improved basis for enhanced relevance of animal nutrition research, 2) enhanced development of animal feeds, diets, and nutrient supply, 3) applied drivers of increases in efficiency of food and fiber production, 4) a foundational platform for assessing, understanding, and mitigating nutrient related environmental impacts, 5) a core aspect of effectively addressing animal health and welfare, 6) an information base for informing regulatory actions regardinganimal nutrition, feeding, and welfare, 7) provision of critical materials for educating and equipping the next generation of animal scientists, and 8) a basis for increased research efficiencies across research units within the United States and beyond.
Animal Health Component
50%
Research Effort Categories
Basic
50%
Applied
50%
Developmental
(N/A)
Goals / Objectives
Develop and foster relationships with commercial laboratories for ongoing submission of feed analyses and automated data screening methodologies. The number of feedstuff analyses made by commercial laboratories dwarfs those made by academic laboratories. Access to that data has a tremendous effect on accuracy and precision of values but it must be vetted before inclusion.
Expand multi-level training of modeling techniques to academic and industry nutritionists and graduate students across multiple species at professional meetings. Recently trained nutritionists recognize their need and have readily embraced the professional society workshops that began during the present project. This will be expanded in scope (across species and areas of modeling) and depth.
Retain institutional knowledge related to techniques and measurements critical to nutritional research. Without a detailed descriptive library of research methodologies, the discipline of nutritional physiology risks loss of capabilities that have been developed as faculty retire and are not replaced.
Project Methods
Accomplishments and impacts of NRSP-9 will be measured directly by the level of success in accomplishing the goals and by meeting the deliverables set out in the Strategic Plan. Reports of research support activities through commonly viewed channels such as peer-reviewed journals will be tracked and evaluated in terms of impact. As such, number and quality of publications (e.g., citation index) is a common measure of both research support accomplishments and outreach efforts to the community. Members of NRSP-9 also evaluate the accomplishments and impacts of the research support by monitoring stakeholder usage of digital resources (e.g., number of newsletter recipients, website user tracking statistics, and social media engagements). By relying on stakeholder usage metrics, NRSP-9 members get a more accurate and more authentic understanding of the usefulness of different research support approaches. Google Analytics metrics like visits, unique visitors, and page views help assess the magnitude of use while metrics like average time per visit and pages per visit help determine indirectly the potential impact of these different website components. Users who find value in a page divert more of their time to that resource. By relying on stakeholder usage metrics, NRSP-9 members get a more accurate and more authentic understanding of the usefulness of different research support approaches. Location use statistics help identify the global impacts of NRSP-9 while the proportion of new users helps to identify saturation of NRSP-9 utility within the stakeholder community. In addition to the internal and ongoing monitoring of project activities, an external evaluation of the entire program will be conducted in Year Threeof the program to assure that activities are meeting program objectives.