Cooperative Ecosystem Studies Unit, Rocky Mountain CESU | Apply Online

Opportunity Summary:

The Cooperative Ecosystem Studies Unit, Rocky Mountain CESU funding opportunity (Funding Opportunity Number G16AS00117) was issued by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) within the Department of the Interior, specifically through the Northern Rocky Mountain Science Center (NOROCK). It was offered as a discretionary cooperative agreement under the Science and Technology and other Research and Development category (CFDA 15.808). The opportunity was created on July 25, 2016, with an original closing date of August 10, 2016. USGS anticipated making a single award, with a maximum funding level (award ceiling) of $19,620. Eligibility was listed broadly as "Others," with further clarification referenced in the opportunity's additional eligibility information.

The core purpose of the award was to develop a practical and defensible methodology that combines two major information streams: data describing habitat conversion (with a focus on energy development disturbance) and data describing species distributions. The goal of merging these datasets is to better describe and predict how human-caused disturbance affects biodiversity within the Williston Basin, an area that has experienced substantial oil and gas development. Beyond serving the Williston Basin specifically, USGS emphasized that the approach should be scalable and transferable, meaning it should be designed so it can be applied to other kinds of habitat conversion (not just oil and gas), other geographic regions, and other groups of organisms (taxa). In other words, the project is intended to produce both useful regional products and a repeatable analytical framework that could support broader conservation and land-management decisions.

USGS identified a set of concrete deliverables that together form a workflow from mapping development footprints to projecting biodiversity impacts. First, the project was expected to produce a dataset delineating all oil well pads in the Williston Basin. This implies a geospatial layer that consistently maps the location and extent of well pad footprints, creating a foundational representation of the physical conversion of habitat associated with development. Second, the project was to create a total species distribution map for birds, summarizing species richness across all avian species. This kind of product typically functions as a spatial depiction of where more species are expected to occur, providing a baseline view of biodiversity patterns. Third, in addition to overall richness, USGS requested a weighted species distribution map that prioritizes species of concern, meaning the mapping should incorporate some weighting scheme that increases the influence of sensitive, at-risk, declining, or otherwise management-relevant bird species so that areas important for those species stand out even if overall species richness is not the highest.

Another key deliverable was an ecological effects layer that explicitly maps observed or inferred ecological responses to energy development. USGS provided examples of effects such as avoidance behavior, reproductive success, and similar metrics, indicating the intent to capture not merely where species occur, but how development changes their behavior, fitness, or population performance. This layer is meant to translate development activity into biologically meaningful impact signals. Finally, the opportunity called for habitat suitability maps that integrate the total and weighted bird distribution maps with the ecological effects layer, and then use models to predict habitat and biodiversity loss associated with future energy development. That last component points to a forward-looking application: building a modeling approach capable of estimating how additional, anticipated development could reduce habitat quality or biodiversity, thereby helping planners and resource managers evaluate tradeoffs, identify areas where impacts might be greatest, and potentially guide mitigation or avoidance strategies.

Taken together, the grant opportunity centers on building an integrated geospatial and modeling toolkit for the Williston Basin that links energy infrastructure footprints to bird biodiversity patterns and to measurable ecological consequences, and then leverages those relationships to forecast future losses. The emphasis on scalability and transferability suggests USGS wanted methods that are not one-off maps, but a structured approach that could be reused for other disturbance types, landscapes, and wildlife groups as similar conservation and development conflicts arise elsewhere.

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