Monitoring the Relative Abundance of Bats at National Parks of the Upper Midwest - GLKN | NOIP17AC00128

Opportunity Information: Apply for NOIP17AC00128

The grant opportunity, titled "Monitoring the Relative Abundance of Bats at National Parks of the Upper Midwest - GLKN" (Funding Opportunity Number NOIP17AC00128), is a National Park Service (NPS) cooperative agreement focused on improving and validating bat monitoring across national park units in the upper Midwest. It sits within the Great Lakes Inventory and Monitoring Network (GLKN), which is responsible for coordinating long-term ecological monitoring in the region. The project is framed around natural resource monitoring and is designed to strengthen how bat populations are tracked over time using acoustic data, which is especially important given ongoing conservation concerns affecting bats in North America.

At the center of the project is a partnership with North Dakota State University (NDSU), which would support and engage a Master of Science student during the 2017 and 2018 academic years. The student would help GLKN coordinate bat monitoring activities across ten NPS park units. The field component is not exploratory in the sense of inventing new collection techniques; instead, it relies on established field methods already laid out in a draft protocol that includes detailed standard operating procedures. Park-based biological technicians would handle much of the routine deployment of acoustic recording devices, and the student would function as a coordinator who helps ensure consistency across parks and manages the flow of information, including the electronic transfer of recorded data back to GLKN.

A major scientific goal of the agreement is to test and quantify how bat species identifications differ depending on the method used to classify echolocation calls. Specifically, GLKN wants the student to address the question: given current knowledge of bat species ranges in the upper Midwest, how do results from proprietary call-identification software packages compare with expert manual identification of bat echolocation calls? In practical terms, this means the project is not only about collecting large volumes of acoustic recordings, but also about validating the reliability and potential bias of different identification approaches. This is a key issue for acoustic monitoring programs because automated software classifiers can process enormous datasets efficiently, but their outputs can vary across packages and may not match expert interpretations, particularly when species have similar call structures or when recordings are noisy or partial.

To answer that question, the student would be expected to design a scientifically rigorous experiment comparing at least two software packages and at least two human observers who will manually vet a portion of the calls. The announcement notes the scale involved by referencing that roughly 450,000 calls were recorded in 2016, underscoring that this monitoring effort produces very large datasets. The manual review requirement is described as at least 1 percent of all calls recorded each year, meaning thousands of calls would still be reviewed by experts even with a relatively small sampling fraction. The intent is to generate defensible, quantitative evidence about agreement and disagreement among tools and analysts, which can then inform how GLKN interprets acoustic monitoring results and potentially how it standardizes protocols moving forward.

Because this is a cooperative agreement rather than a typical grant with minimal federal involvement, the NPS role is described as substantial across nearly every stage of the work. GLKN staff would be deeply involved in project design, implementation, data management, analysis, and the development of written products such as reports and publications. The NPS principal investigator would also serve on the student thesis committee, which emphasizes that the work is meant to be both academically rigorous and directly useful to the agency. This structure makes the project both an applied monitoring effort and an education and workforce development opportunity, using a graduate research framework to improve an operational federal monitoring program.

Eligibility is tied to participation in the Cooperative Ecosystem Studies Units (CESU) network. The recipient is identified as a member of the Northern Great Plains CESU and is operating under an existing Master Cooperative Agreement (P12AC31164) that authorizes NDSU to carry out specific tasks for NPS. In other words, this opportunity is structured to be implemented through an established federal-academic partnership mechanism rather than through open competition among all possible applicants. The advising professor at NDSU, Erin Gillam, is highlighted as having specialized expertise in bat echolocation, call identification, and bat behavior and ecology, which signals that the project depends heavily on subject-matter expertise to ensure that both the experimental comparison and the manual vetting are credible.

From an administrative standpoint, the opportunity was issued by the Department of the Interior, National Park Service, under CFDA 15.945. It was created on January 18, 2017, with an original closing date of February 1, 2017. The award ceiling is listed as $100,000, and the expected number of awards is one, indicating a single, relatively small and targeted cooperative agreement intended to support a specific graduate-led coordination and validation effort rather than a broader multi-recipient research program. Overall, the project is aimed at strengthening bat monitoring consistency across parks, improving confidence in species identification from acoustic recordings, and producing guidance and findings that GLKN and NPS can use in long-term monitoring and decision-making.

• The Department of the Interior, National Park Service in the natural resources sector is offering a public funding opportunity titled "Monitoring the Relative Abundance of Bats at National Parks of the Upper Midwest - GLKN" and is now available to receive applicants.
• Interested and eligible applicants and submit their applications by referencing the CFDA number(s): 15.945.
• This funding opportunity was created on Jan 18, 2017.
• Applicants must submit their applications by Feb 01, 2017. (Agency may still review applications by suitable applicants for the remaining/unused allocated funding in 2026.)
• Each selected applicant is eligible to receive up to $100,000.00 in funding.
• The number of recipients for this funding is limited to 1 candidate(s).
• Eligible applicants include: Others (see text field entitled Additional Information on Eligibility for clarification).

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