Grants / Department of Defense / Engineer Research and Development Center

W81EWF-25-SOI-0014: Assessing Water Quality Trends and Suspended Sediment Surrogates Above and Below Reservoirs Using High-Frequency Sensors in New Mexico and Southern Colorado

Closed Closed August 11, 2025 Opportunity W81EWF-25-SOI-0014 ☆ Save

This grant is closed. A newer notice from the same program is open now: ERDC Broad Agency Announcement (W912HZ26S0001). Status: Closes January 1, 2027 (55 days left). It is in our archive of Engineer Research and Development Center notices from 2025.

• Award ceiling$150,000
• Total funding$950,000
• Expected awards1
• Cost sharingNot required
• Funding typeCooperative Agreement

Key dates

Who can apply

This opportunity was open to the applicants described in the notice.

• Others (see text field entitled "Additional Information on Eligibility" for clarification)

This opportunity is restricted to non-federal partners of the Colorado Plateau Cooperative Ecosystems Studies Unit (CESU).

Is this a realistic fit?

• Past Basic, Applied, and Advanced Research in Science and Engineering awards averaged $1.1 million; this notice allows up to $150,000 per award.
• Most of the program's money (69% over five years) went to colleges and universities.
• No cost sharing or match is required.

What the grant funds

The Vendor and SPA will maintain eleven (11) real-time, long-term, and high-frequency water quality monitoring stations above and below SPA-managed reservoirs (Table 1) to achieve Objective 1. At each station, five water quality parameters (i.e., temperature, conductivity, dissolved oxygen, pH and turbidity) will be collected using multi-parameter sensors (YSI Sonde). Sensor maintenance will occur at 4–6-week intervals following current USGS operating procedures (Wagner et al. 2006). All time-series records collected will be analyzed and approved following USGS procedures (Wagner et al. 2006) using Aquarius Time-Series (Aquatic Informatics, Vancouver, Canada) which the Vender will purchase and maintain, providing SPA with remote access. The Vendor and SPA will maintain real-time data acquisition and photovoltaic power systems (where installed) at each site. The Vendor will maintain the communication and retrieval between all deployed sensors, dataloggers, computers, and servers where data will be stored. Continuous water quality datasets will be made publicly available through CUAHSI HydroShare, a collaborative platform for sharing hydrologic data, models, and code (Objective 1). It supports findability, accessibility, interoperability, and reusability (FAIR) data principles. Each dataset will include comprehensive metadata and documentation, detailing the source, collection methods, and any processing steps. Findings from this project should demonstrate the importance of continued high-frequency sampling to further elucidate how reservoirs are impacted by riverine water and sediment deposition and how these impacts are affected by climatic and hydrologic variability and the impacts of watershed-scale disturbances (e.g., drought, flood, wildfire), point-source and non-point-source pollution, and alteration of the natural flow regime (Objective 2). The Vendor will propose specific research topics that incorporate sonde data collected under this project, in addition to other readily available data sets, to address these objectives and that are also of interest to the greater scientific community. While collecting accurate and reliable suspended sediment data is critical to water resources planning, reservoir management, and research, the cost of installing, operating and maintaining the suspended sediment gages has caused a decline in the existing network.

Category: Science and Technology and other Research and Development.

Applying now

This notice no longer takes applications. Apply under the newer notice, W912HZ26S0001, which is open now.

The notice on Grants.gov keeps its full text and attachments, which is useful for planning a resubmission.