Inventory and Monitoring of Northern Red bellied Cooter (NRBC), UMASS | Apply Online

Opportunity Summary:

This grant opportunity, titled "Inventory and Monitoring of Northern Red bellied Cooter (NRBC), UMASS" (Funding Opportunity Number F14AS00322), is a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS), Region 5 discretionary funding action intended to support science and monitoring work focused on the Northern red-bellied cooter, a rare aquatic turtle. The USFWS planned to issue a single cooperative agreement award totaling $58,000, with the full amount serving as the award floor and ceiling, meaning the project was designed around a fixed, specific budget rather than a range. The activity falls under CFDA 15.650 (Research Grants - Generic), with no cost sharing or matching requirement stated.

The award was structured as a sole-source cooperative agreement to the University of Massachusetts (UMass). While the listing shows "unrestricted" eligibility in general terms, the narrative makes clear that the agency intended to fund UMass specifically because of its established role and technical capacity for this particular project. Under the cooperative agreement model, USFWS would typically remain substantially involved in project coordination and implementation, rather than simply providing funds with minimal federal engagement, which aligns with the multi-partner, recovery-oriented nature of the work described.

The core purpose of the project is to carry out inventory and monitoring actions that help reevaluate the NRBC population status and geographic range. A central motivation is to determine whether the species may warrant "downlisting" under the Endangered Species Act (or analogous conservation status frameworks), which generally requires credible, up-to-date evidence about population trends, distribution, threats, and the effectiveness of ongoing recovery actions. The opportunity notes that UMass has been collaborating for several years with the Massachusetts Division of Fisheries and Wildlife (MDFW), the Eastern Massachusetts National Wildlife Refuge (NWR) Complex, and the USFWS New England Field Office to secure Competitive State Wildlife Grant or similar conservation funding (referenced as CRI) to support this reevaluation work.

In addition to field inventory and monitoring, the project would incorporate an evaluation of the long-running NRBC headstarting program. Headstarting is a conservation strategy in which eggs or hatchlings are raised in protected conditions through vulnerable early life stages and later released, with the goal of increasing survival and recruitment into the wild population. MDFW and USFWS have reportedly worked together on this headstarting effort for decades, and this award would support assessing how well that program is contributing to recovery outcomes, presumably by linking release practices and survival assumptions to observed population indicators and monitoring data.

UMass is described as uniquely qualified because the proposed monitoring and inventory approach is based on protocols the cooperator developed for another rare aquatic turtle species, the Blanding's turtle. That implies the methods are field-tested, regionally relevant, and likely tailored to the realities of surveying cryptic freshwater turtles (for example, standardized trapping or basking surveys, mark-recapture methods, habitat use documentation, and repeatable monitoring designs that can detect trends over time). The emphasis on established protocols also suggests the project aims to generate comparable, defensible data suitable for informing formal status assessments and interagency recovery decisions.

Administratively, the opportunity was posted July 21, 2014, with an original and current closing date of July 28, 2014, and an archive date of August 21, 2014, indicating a short public window consistent with a planned sole-source action. The expected number of awards was one. For access issues or questions, the listed contact was Dean Rhine (USFWS Region 5), with phone number 413-253-8559 and email DeanRhine@fws.gov, and the general listing referenced Grants.gov as the additional information link.

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