Cooperative Agreement for CESU-affiliated Partner with Great Rivers Cooperative Ecosystem Studies Unit

The summary for the Cooperative Agreement for CESU-affiliated Partner with Great Rivers Cooperative Ecosystem Studies Unit 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 Agreement for CESU-affiliated Partner with Great Rivers Cooperative Ecosystem Studies Unit: The USGS is offering a funding opportunity to a CESU partner for research in “Water quality conditions protective of freshwater mussel viability and reproduction.” Research Objectives: The objectives of this funding opportunity are to provide science to assess the sensitivity of mussels to long-term chemical exposure. Currently, the ASTM standard methods recommend a test duration of 28 days for conducting chronic toxicity test with juvenile mussels, and the test endpoints are survival, growth (individual length and dry weight), and biomass (total dry weight of surviving organisms per replicate) – unlike test methods for fishes, there are no accepted test methods for mussel reproduction at present. There is considerable uncertainty that the survival and growth responses from chronic 28-day exposures can be used to adequately assess reproductive impacts. The main goal of this project is to develop methods to determine reproductive effects on freshwater mussels, and using the newly developed methods to evaluate the toxicity of a CERCLA hazardous chemicals. Specific studies include: Develop methods using a short-term brooding mussel to evaluate the effects of a model chemical in a partial life cycle test. Refine and validate a partial life cycle test method using a chemical of interest to mussel resource managers. Methods will be used by federal, regional, and state risk assessors to screen, regulate, and mitigate chemicals that occur or have the potential to occur in listed mussel habitat and used to update ASTM International standard methods for toxicity testing with mussels.