Continuation of the New Jersey Pinelands Long-Term Environmental and Economic Monitoring Program

The summary for the Continuation of the New Jersey Pinelands Long-Term Environmental and Economic Monitoring Program 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 National Park Service, which is the U.S. government agency offering this grant.

Continuation of the New Jersey Pinelands Long-Term Environmental and Economic Monitoring Program: In the early 1990's, the New Jersey Pinelands Commission Science Office initiated a long-term environmental and economic monitoring program with the ultimate goals of evaluating the ecological and economic consequences of the Pinelands Comprehensive Management Plan. The main objectives of the program are to 1) characterize the effect of existing land-use patterns on aquatic and wetland resources and to monitor long-term changes in these resources and 2) continually evaluate the health of the economy of the Pinelands region in an objective and reliable way in order to increase the understanding of critical issues needed to protect the integrity of the Pinelands and to identify relationships that can be more broadly applied throughout the Pinelands as part of the Commissions review of proposed development projects. This funding supports on-going long-term monitoring efforts of the Science Office including: . cooperative stream-gaging programs designed to determine whether wastewater transfers are affecting stream discharge in portions of the Mullica River Basin and the Upper Great Egg Harbor River Basin. Changes in base flow at monitoring sites are assessed relative to flows at index sites. . surveys of four watersheds to monitor water quality (pH and specific conductance), stream vegetation, impoundment vegetation, stream-fish, impoundment-fish, and anurans (frogs and toads). Specific conductance and pH will also be monitored at a network of 47 benchmark stations distributed throughout the four watersheds. GIS layers and associated metadata will be created for each site surveyed during the first round of Pinelands-wide watershed surveys. . monitoring of water levels and calling anurans (frogs and toads) at five pitch pine lowland reference sites. . monitoring of vegetation and environmental data from 30 previously established study plots to describe the effects of variable hydrology on wetland succession in an abandoned-cranberry bog. . comparisons vegetation structure and composition between managed bulk electric-transmission rights-of-way located throughout the Pinelands and reference habitats of early successional habitats not associated with rights-of-way. . defining and quantifying the relationship between the proximity of developed lands and the ecological integrity of Pinelands wetlands using biological indicators such as palustrine-wetland plants and pond-breeding frogs and toads. . updating core economic variables ( e.g. population, age demographics, building permits, unemployment, retailsales, etc.) as needed. . updating supplemental variables focusing on examining the non-residential building activity in the Pinelands, the growth of the student population in Pinelands communities, and gross debt per capita and gross debt ratio. . examining the 25-year historical trend of effective tax rates in each Pinelands municipality versus the regional South Jersey average. . examining and reporting on indicators of fiscal health and on ways to measure and compare fiscal health among municipalities, identifying Pinelands towns that are most in need of fiscal assistance, and designing a corresponding funding model. . conducting a vacant-land value study by performing a hedonic regression analysis using the attributes of a particular property (location, size, zoning, etc.) in order to calculate a value using ordinary least squares analysis. In those areas where limited information is available other techniques (e.g. a Delphi method) will have to be employed using a group of professionals in the area of real estate to estimate the likely selling value of a particular parcel or parcels.