Cooperative Ecosystem Studies Unit, Rocky Mountain CESU | G19AS00091

Opportunity Information: Apply for G19AS00091

This grant opportunity, titled Cooperative Ecosystem Studies Unit, Rocky Mountain CESU (Funding Opportunity Number G19AS00091), was offered by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Fort Collins Science Center under the Department of the Interior. It was structured as a discretionary cooperative agreement within the Science and Technology/Research and Development category (CFDA 15.808). The program was designed to fund one project, with a maximum award amount of $223,940, and it targeted eligible applicants that are partners in the Rocky Mountain Cooperative Ecosystem Studies Unit (CESU), as described in the opportunity's eligibility guidance.

The core purpose of the opportunity was to support applied research that helps public land and wildlife managers make better landscape-level planning and management decisions across the western United States. The USGS was specifically seeking work that examines how land use and land management interact with habitat conditions and wildlife populations. The opportunity emphasizes that western landscapes are shaped by a mix of human activities and natural processes, including energy development, domestic livestock grazing, vegetation treatments, habitat restoration actions, wildfire, and climate-driven change. Because these drivers often overlap in space and time, their combined effects can be difficult to predict, and managers need clearer, evidence-based understanding of how these interacting factors influence habitat quality and wildlife distribution and abundance.

A major theme of the solicitation was the challenge of managing at large spatial scales where ownership and administrative boundaries fragment decision-making. The opportunity notes that management priorities, legal mandates, and conservation goals can differ across jurisdictions, even when wildlife populations and ecological processes move across the same broader landscape. As a result, the USGS sought research that can characterize habitat trends over time and connect those trends to management actions and disturbances, so that agencies can plan more effectively and adaptively. In practice, that means quantifying and interpreting changes in habitats caused by development, fire, climate variability, restoration projects, and other treatments, and then linking those habitat dynamics to wildlife population responses.

The work was intended to be directly useful for management decisions in grasslands, shrublands, and woodlands of the western U.S., with an explicit focus on native wildlife species of concern to federal and state agencies. The opportunity highlights groups such as grouse, songbirds, ungulates, and small mammals, and it indicates a need for analyses that address multiple species rather than treating each species in isolation. In particular, it calls for understanding how combinations of development patterns, restoration efforts, vegetation treatments, and fire regimes interact to affect wildlife and habitats, reflecting the reality that managers often implement actions simultaneously and must weigh tradeoffs among species and objectives.

Administratively, the opportunity was posted on July 9, 2019, with an original closing date of July 26, 2019, and it anticipated making a single award. Because the instrument was a cooperative agreement, it implies an expectation of substantial involvement or collaboration with the USGS during the project, which is typical when the agency wants research products tightly aligned with operational planning needs. Overall, the grant was aimed at generating actionable, landscape-scale science that helps agencies understand changing habitat conditions and wildlife responses in the face of development, management, and environmental change across the western United States.

• The Department of the Interior, U. S. Geological Survey in the science and technology and other research and development sector is offering a public funding opportunity titled "Cooperative Ecosystem Studies Unit, Rocky Mountain CESU" and is now available to receive applicants.
• Interested and eligible applicants and submit their applications by referencing the CFDA number(s): 15.808.
• This funding opportunity was created on Jul 09, 2019.
• Applicants must submit their applications by Jul 26, 2019. (Agency may still review applications by suitable applicants for the remaining/unused allocated funding in 2026.)
• Each selected applicant is eligible to receive up to $223,940.00 in funding.
• The number of recipients for this funding is limited to 1 candidate(s).
• Eligible applicants include: Others (see text field entitled Additional Information on Eligibility for clarification).

Apply for G19AS00091

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