Conserving New England cottontail rabbits in Region 5, what other species benefit | Apply Online

Opportunity Summary:

The grant opportunity titled "Conserving New England cottontail rabbits in Region 5, what other species benefit" is a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) cooperative agreement intended to support up to five years of work led by the University of New Hampshire. It falls under CFDA 15.654 (Visitor Facility Enhancements / Refuges and Wildlife) and is issued under the authority of the Fish and Wildlife Conservation Act of 1934 (16 U.S.C. 2901-2911). The work is centered on National Wildlife Refuges and surrounding lands in the FWS Northeast Region (Region 5), with the overall goal of improving how shrubland habitats are planned and managed to support the New England cottontail (NEC) rabbit and other wildlife that rely on young forest and shrub-dominated conditions.

At the heart of the project is the idea of "biological planning" and how managers decide what habitat to create, restore, or maintain, especially in landscapes where shrublands are patchy, temporary, and often in competition with other land uses. Shrublands in the Northeast tend to be early-successional habitats, meaning they occur after disturbance (like fire, timber harvest, mowing, storms, or targeted habitat treatments) and then gradually transition into taller forest if not periodically reset. Because of that, agencies and partners often need clear, defensible approaches to justify where shrubland should be maintained and what outcomes to expect for multiple species. This grant supports research designed to tighten that planning process by testing assumptions that are commonly made when conservation programs use a limited set of focal or representative species to guide habitat management decisions.

A major focus is the "surrogate species" approach, particularly as it is used in shrubland bird conservation. In many conservation settings, managers select one or more representative species (often birds with well-studied habitat relationships) and then design habitat prescriptions around the needs of those species, assuming that other shrubland-dependent wildlife will also benefit. This project examines whether that assumption holds true in practice and, specifically, how well shrubland management aimed at bird surrogates aligns with the habitat requirements and conservation outcomes for the New England cottontail. The NEC is identified here as a federal Candidate Species, which generally signals that it has enough conservation concern to warrant consideration for listing under the Endangered Species Act, but is not formally listed at the time of the announcement. The project therefore has a practical conservation planning angle: if managers use bird-focused shrubland prescriptions, will that reliably support NEC populations, or are there gaps that need to be addressed in management design?

In terms of what the grant is paying for, the description emphasizes "securing information" on the New England cottontail and other shrubland-associated wildlife at and around refuges. That wording points to field data collection and analysis: documenting where NEC and other target wildlife occur, how they use habitat created or maintained by refuge management actions, and how different shrubland structures and patch configurations relate to occupancy, survival, or other performance measures. The phrase "assumption based research" implies that the work is explicitly structured to test the underlying assumptions of surrogate-based planning, rather than simply describing habitat conditions. The expected payoff is more refined guidance for refuge habitat management and regional planning, so that shrubland treatments can be designed with clearer predictions about which suites of species will benefit, and under what conditions.

While the announcement does not list specific additional species by name, it is clear about the broader beneficiary group: "other shrubland associated wildlife" and "other shrubland dependent species," with particular attention to shrubland birds. In the Northeast, that category commonly includes early-successional and shrubland birds such as New England shrubland specialists and declining species that depend on dense thickets, regenerating clearcuts, scrubby fields, and edge-dominated young forest. It also commonly includes a range of non-bird wildlife that use dense low cover for nesting, foraging, and predator avoidance, such as certain small mammals, reptiles and amphibians that benefit from the warm, structurally complex conditions in young habitats, and invertebrates tied to shrub and early-successional plant communities. The project is essentially asking which of those broader shrubland species groups actually gain measurable conservation benefits when management is guided by one or more representative bird species, and whether NEC is among the beneficiaries or requires different habitat features than bird-based prescriptions typically provide.

Administratively, the opportunity is categorized as discretionary and uses a cooperative agreement, which usually indicates substantial involvement from the federal agency during the project (for example, coordination with refuge staff, shared planning, or joint oversight). The announcement notes that there is no cost-sharing or matching requirement. It also indicates that the posting is "for notification purposes only," with no active application window listed in the usual way, which is consistent with situations where an agency is announcing an intended award to a specific eligible partner (here, a public institution of higher education: the University of New Hampshire). The funding ceiling and total funding fields are listed as zero in the summary data, which typically means the dollar amount was not entered into the public synopsis rather than implying there is no financial assistance at all, especially since the narrative clearly describes a multi-year federal assistance award.

For anyone needing the original posting, it is associated with Funding Opportunity Number F15AS00300 and was posted June 29, 2015, with an archive date of July 13, 2015. The contact listed for access issues is Laurie McDermott, Grants Specialist, at 1 (413) 253-8290 and lauriemcdermott@fws.gov, and the general listing points back to Grants.gov for additional reference.

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