Nutrient Enrichment Critical Loads of Atmospheric Nitrogen Deposition for Aquatic Ecosystems in the Western U.S. | Apply Online

Opportunity Summary:

This notice describes a National Park Service (NPS) intent to make a non-competitive cooperative agreement award for a research project called "Nutrient Enrichment Critical Loads of Atmospheric Nitrogen Deposition for Aquatic Ecosystems in the Western U.S." It is not an open solicitation and is explicitly not requesting applications. Instead, it serves as public notice that NPS plans to fund Washington State University (WSU) for this specific work under statutory authority 54 USC 101702(b), through the Cooperative Research and Training Programs - Resources of the National Park System (CESU) mechanism (CFDA listed as 15.945 in the narrative, with a separate listing of 15.954 in the opportunity metadata). The anticipated total federal funding is $49,671 with no cost share requirement, structured as a cooperative agreement lasting about 20 months, running from the award date through March 31, 2017. The announcement lists one expected award and identifies June Zastrow at NPS as the point of contact.

The core environmental problem driving the project is atmospheric nitrogen pollution and its downstream effects on sensitive protected lands across the western United States, including wilderness areas, national parks, and national forests. Nitrogen from combustion sources like vehicles and power plants, along with agricultural emissions to soils and waters, can be transported long distances and deposited onto remote ecosystems via wet deposition (rain and snow) and dry deposition (gases and particles). Once deposited, excess nitrogen can disrupt ecosystem function by altering nutrient cycling, reducing biodiversity, and contributing to acidification. The announcement emphasizes that high-elevation lakes in the West often show some of the earliest measurable chemical and biological responses to increased nitrogen deposition, making them valuable "early warning" indicators for whether current emission controls and land management strategies are actually protective.

The project is framed around the concept of "critical loads," meaning the deposition rate (or threshold) at which harmful ecological change is expected to occur. Federal agencies and other partners have been building a nationwide scientific foundation for these thresholds, including development of the National Critical Loads Database (NCLD) by the National Atmospheric Deposition Program Critical Loads of Atmospheric Deposition Science Committee. NPS notes that the NCLD, as it existed at the time of this notice, did not yet include critical loads specifically addressing nutrient enrichment impacts of atmospheric nitrogen deposition in aquatic ecosystems. The practical purpose of this award is to fill that gap by compiling and analyzing relevant lake data from across the Western U.S. so that nutrient enrichment critical load information for aquatic systems can be added to the NCLD and used more directly in policy and land management decisions.

The planned work is organized into two phases. Phase I focuses on identifying and gathering existing data, building a usable project database, and assessing data quality and applicability. The types of information to be assembled include lake water chemistry data, biological data (with particular relevance to phytoplankton communities and responses), GIS layers, and modeled or measured nitrogen deposition data. Phase II is the analytical phase, where the compiled data are evaluated to determine the extent to which Western U.S. lakes show signs of deposition-driven nutrient enrichment, and where the team will attempt, if the dataset supports it, to calculate regional critical loads for nitrogen deposition. While the emphasis is on high-elevation lakes within national parks and national forests, the scope can extend to lower-elevation lakes on other federal or state lands if the available data are relevant and comparable.

The cooperative agreement structure is justified by the expectation of substantial NPS involvement rather than a hands-off grant relationship. NPS responsibilities include working with WSU and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to finalize goals and objectives, providing access to NPS datasets from Western parks, helping WSU identify and connect with relevant contacts at parks and in other agencies or universities, and jointly agreeing on the Phase II analysis approach. NPS will also provide project oversight and coordinate review of deliverables such as reports. On the recipient side, WSU will rely heavily on a graduate student who will complete the work as part of a Ph.D. dissertation and postdoctoral effort under the guidance of a principal investigator. The student will coordinate with NPS, EPA, the U.S. Forest Service, and other researchers to assemble the datasets, standardize and format them into a functional database, run the analyses, and prepare the resulting technical products.

A major element of the notice is the single-source, non-competitive rationale. Under Department of the Interior single-source policy (505 DM 2), NPS cites two grounds for not competing the award: (2) continuation and (4) unique qualifications. The continuation argument is that this effort builds directly on ongoing or recently funded work and that forcing competition would disrupt continuity and slow or compromise completion. The unique qualifications argument is detailed: the WSU principal investigator and graduate student have already performed closely related research with NPS Air Resources Division support (Task Agreement P13AC00955), including experiments quantifying phytoplankton responses to nitrogen increases in high-elevation lakes in Mount Rainier (MORA), North Cascades (NOCA), and Olympic (OLYM) National Parks. That work produced a unique, directly applicable dataset including water chemistry, phytoplankton species distributions, and nitrogen response thresholds, and the student has already been building a structured water chemistry database with NPS and U.S. Geological Survey collaboration. Because the team is already near completion of a similar integrated effort in the Pacific Northwest, NPS argues they are in the best position to efficiently scale the approach to a broader Western U.S. synthesis and to ensure the existing Pacific Northwest database is seamlessly integrated into a larger regional database.

The notice also highlights a policy relevance advantage that supports the unique qualifications claim. Through an NSF-funded NSPIRE fellowship, the graduate student completed environmental policy training and served a three-month fellowship at EPA's Clean Air Markets Division in Washington, D.C. That division is connected to the critical loads community, helps maintain or use the NCLD, and supports periodic review of National Ambient Air Quality Standards under the Clean Air Act. NPS argues this background makes the student particularly well-suited not only to generate scientifically credible results, but also to deliver outputs in a form that can be incorporated into the NCLD and used by regulatory and land management decision-makers. In short, the project is meant to turn scattered existing lake and deposition datasets into a coherent Western U.S. resource that can support defensible nutrient enrichment critical load estimates and strengthen how agencies evaluate and manage nitrogen deposition impacts on sensitive aquatic ecosystems.

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