Cooperative Agreement for affiliated Partner with the Desert Southwest Cooperative Ecosystem Studies Unit (CESU)

The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), a scientific agency of the U.S. Department of the Interior, is announcing a funding opportunity under the Cooperative Ecosystem Studies Units (CESU) Program. This opportunity seeks to support ecological research and monitoring within the riparian corridor of the Lower Colorado River. The focus of the proposed project is to utilize remote sensing technologies to assess vegetation greenness and actual evapotranspiration (ETa) across both unrestored riparian areas and restoration sites managed under the Lower Colorado River Multi-Species Conservation Plan (MSCP). The opportunity is open exclusively to CESU partners affiliated with the Desert Southwest CESU. The project aims to evaluate how native and invasive vegetation respond to varying water availability, including drought conditions and water deliveries. The Southwest Biological Science Center (SBSC) at USGS is particularly interested in capturing trends using vegetation indices like NDVI and EVI2, as well as estimating ETa through EVI2-based models. The proposal calls for the integration of satellite data, weather station readings, and gridded data products such as Daymet and CIMIS to compute potential evapotranspiration (ETo) using the Penman-Monteith and Blaney-Criddle methods. The successful proposal will include a comprehensive approach to monitoring plant health over time, focusing on both long-term trends and short-term variability. Specific research tasks include the generation of change maps, historical and phenological analyses, estimation of drought impact through SPEI, and data server population with derived vegetation index information. The project should result in publicly accessible data sets via USGS Data Releases, and applicants are expected to assist with the development of new field-based monitoring systems. One cooperative agreement award is anticipated under this funding opportunity. The total funding available for the project is estimated at $99,000 over a