FY17 Sea Duck Joint Venture Competitive Grants | Apply Online

Opportunity Summary:

The FY17 Sea Duck Joint Venture (SDJV) Competitive Grants opportunity (Funding Opportunity Number F16AS00330) was a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS), Department of the Interior funding call meant to support targeted research that helps managers make better, more defensible conservation and management decisions for North American sea ducks. SDJV is a conservation partnership operating under the North American Waterfowl Management Plan, and over time it shifted from a broad science program toward a more focused set of projects that directly address the most pressing information gaps faced by wildlife managers. The work funded through this program is guided by the SDJV strategic plan and implementation plan (referenced at seaduckjv.org), and the funding itself came from U.S. Congressional appropriations. The legal authority cited for making awards is the Fish and Wildlife Act of 1956 (16 U.S.C. 742).

From an administrative standpoint, this was a discretionary grant/cooperative agreement program in the environment/natural resources and research and development space (CFDA 15.637). Eligibility was listed as unrestricted, meaning proposals could come from a wide range of entity types, as long as any specific eligibility clarifications in the full notice were met. The posting was created July 8, 2016, with an original closing date of September 26, 2016. The maximum award amount was $180,000, and the program anticipated making around seven awards, indicating that SDJV was looking for a small set of well-scoped projects tightly aligned with its priority needs rather than many small, exploratory efforts.

The heart of the opportunity was a set of eight “priority science needs” for FY2017. Several priorities center on improving the accuracy, efficiency, and interpretability of sea duck monitoring, especially aerial survey data that often underpin population estimates and trend assessments. One priority called for developing or refining methods to quantify detection probability, misidentification rates, and count bias in aerial sea duck surveys, which are common sources of error when species are difficult to distinguish or when observation conditions vary. Another priority supported the review of the Waterfowl Breeding Population and Habitat Survey (WBPHS), including analysis to inform whether survey effort should be reallocated, reflecting an interest in making large-scale monitoring programs more statistically efficient and better matched to management questions. A related monitoring priority sought development and/or evaluation of automated techniques for counting birds in aerial photographs of large flocks, including challenging scenarios such as uneven density patterns and plumage differences (uniform versus dimorphic), with the practical goal of reducing time, cost, and human error in image-based counts.

Other priorities focused on filling key regional and species-specific knowledge gaps that affect management decisions. One science need asked for work to determine population monitoring and information needs for sea duck management and conservation on the Great Lakes, a region with unique ecological conditions and management stakeholders where the appropriate monitoring design and decision-relevant metrics may differ from coastal or Arctic-breeding contexts. Another sought improvements to veterinary and husbandry practices to increase post-release survival for sea ducks fitted with implantable transmitters, with emphasis on surf scoter, white-winged scoter, and long-tailed duck. That priority reflects a practical challenge in telemetry studies: if capture, handling, or surgical implantation reduces survival, study results can be biased and the ethical and scientific value of the work is undermined, so improving protocols can directly improve both animal welfare and data quality.

The remaining priorities addressed tools for linking birds to breeding/molting areas and for structuring population assessments at biologically meaningful scales. One priority aimed to demonstrate the spatial resolution achievable using stable isotope analysis of feather samples to infer breeding and molting origins even when reference samples are lacking, particularly for scoters and long-tailed ducks. This would support migration connectivity and origin assignment questions that are otherwise difficult to answer in wide-ranging species. Another priority targeted American common eider recruitment, asking whether recruitment is a limiting factor and, if so, what is driving it. The notice explicitly points to a broad suite of potential bottlenecks, including components of fecundity (such as breeding propensity, clutch size, nest success, and hatching success) as well as duckling survival drivers (predation, habitat-mediated effects, disease, and related factors). Finally, SDJV sought research on population structure across the range of priority sea duck species to determine whether management should treat them as single stocks or multiple sub-populations, and to ensure that demographic rate research used in population models is applied at the correct geographic scale. That priority reflects a common management risk: if a species has meaningful sub-structure, actions based on range-wide averages can miss localized declines or misallocate conservation effort.

Overall, the FY17 SDJV Competitive Grants opportunity was designed to fund applied, manager-relevant science that improves monitoring reliability, modernizes survey and counting methods, strengthens telemetry study outcomes, clarifies migratory connectivity, and sharpens population modeling and stock delineation for sea ducks. The emphasis throughout is on reducing uncertainty in the measurements and assumptions that directly affect conservation decisions, rather than supporting general ecological research without a clear pathway to management application.

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