COOPERATIVE ECOSYSTEMS STUDIES UNIT (CESU) (NORTH & WEST ALASKA CESU)

The summary for the COOPERATIVE ECOSYSTEMS STUDIES UNIT (CESU) (NORTH & WEST ALASKA CESU) grant is detailed below. This summary states who is eligible for the grant, how much grant money will be awarded, current and past deadlines, Catalog of Federal Domestic Assistance (CFDA) numbers, and a sampling of similar government grants. Verify the accuracy of the data FederalGrants.com provides by visiting the webpage noted in the Link to Full Announcement section or by contacting the appropriate person listed as the Grant Announcement Contact. If any section is incomplete, please visit the website for the Geological Survey, which is the U.S. government agency offering this grant.

COOPERATIVE ECOSYSTEMS STUDIES UNIT (CESU) (NORTH & WEST ALASKA CESU): The USGS is leading a vegetation mapping effort for a large DOI-Forest Service cooperative project called LANDFIRE to conduct a nationwide assessment of fire fuels, fire risk, and ecosystem conditions. The project, sponsored by the Wildland Fire Leadership Council (WFLC), require that USGS, together with other partners of the project, conduct a successful research and development activity to produce environmental and ecological data layers and computer models for the project. The project schedule calls for completion of the conterminous US by 2008 and Alaska and Hawaii by 2009. The technical foundation of the vegetation and other ecological map data to be produced as the results of the project is a field reference database. The database will include many field reference data points collected using a sampling design covering spatially all areas of the nation. While field reference data already exist in sufficient quantities in the conterminous US, the state of Alaska does not have adequate coverage of field reference data, owing to the fact of difficult field conditions and short field seasons. Therefore a field data collection effort needs to be conducted in Alaska during the summers of 2006 and 2007, so that the field reference database will be ready for use in order to complete mapping operations by 2009. Towards this end, the USGS seeks to cooperate with scientists and institutions who are leaders in key research areas of vegetation classification, field plant identification, and operation of field data collection. The USGS will benefit from such subcontracts by achieving important demonstrable results of developing accurate LANDFIRE deliverables. Without this subcontract, it is possible that certain deliverables for LANDFIRE cannot be met satisfactorily.