Funding

Svalbox started as an internal project at The University Centre in Svalbard (UNIS) in 2017 and has over the years been developed thanks to a wide range of financing sources, including:

• Networking projects from the University of the Arctic (UArctic) to purchase hardware (drones, 3D printers, field equipment etc.) and software, develop the website, generate educational material, promote Svalbox and organise inclusive workshops. These network projects laid the foundation for a number of newly established courses at UNIS, including AG-222 Integrated Geological Methods: from outcrop to geomodel and AG351/851 Arctic Tectonics and Volcanism;
• A Svalbard Strategic Grant from the Research Council of Norway to use Svalbox as a platform to develop international research projects on Svalbard magmatism and to develop the platform with additional functionality and data types;
• A number of Arctic Field Grants typically awarded to our MSc and PhD students to conduct field work in Svalbard. Svalbox data is ideally acquired in parallel with the scientific work to support the students and to keep data acquisition and environmental access costs as low as possible;
• Seed funding from iEarth to develop the VRSvalbard platform and to generate how-to workflows for various Svalbox elements;
• Funding for a data management workshop from SIOS; 
• Direct support to field campaigns to cover the salary expenses of Svalbox field assistants, funded by Equinor AS for the summer 2023 field season;
• Financial contribution from several research projects for fieldwork, equipment maintenance, research assistant salary for data digitization etc. The most important of these was the now completed Research Centre for Arctic Petroleum Research (www.arcex.no);
• Course budgets at UNIS to cover some of the required processing hardware in the UNIS-based PC lab, and some fieldwork costs;
• An international collaboration project, NOR-R-AM (https://norramarctic.wordpress.com/), that contributed financially to establish the AG351/851 course at UNIS;

Having said that, we have ambitions to expand Svalbox activity in the future and are actively seeking financing options for both short- and long-term plans. Please do not hesitate to contact us to discuss this further.

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