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This solicitation seeks the services of a qualified organization to manage and operate an Ocean Bottom Seismometer Instrument Center established and sponsored by Marine Geology and Geophysics research programs within NSF's Division of Ocean Sciences. Research activities requiring the use of the existing pool of instruments supported by NSF are expected to continue well beyond the period of performance for the existing Ocean Bottom Seismometer Instrument Pool Management Office award, scheduled to expire in early 2018. The award resulting from this solicitation will be administered as a Cooperative Agreement with a single Lead Institution that will perform the OBSIC activities described herein.

The goal of the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative (GLRI) is to target the most significant environmental problems in the Great Lakes ecosystem by funding and implementing projects that address these problems. This single source funding opportunity to The Nature Conservancy funds fee title acquisition of land from a willing seller at the Bailey's Harbor Boreal Forest and Wetlands State Natural Area in Door County, Wisconsin. The program authorizing statutes for GLRI awards are listed in CFDA number 15.662 located at CFDA.gov.

The Fusion Energy Sciences (FES) of the Office of Science (SC), U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), herby announces its interest in receiving applications to carry out experimental research in magnetic fusion energy sciences on long-pulse overseas stellarator facilities, namely Wendelstein 7-X (Germany) and the Large Helical Device (LHD - Japan). The research should be related to the planning, execution, and analysis of experiments concerning the topical areas described below. The FES Burning Plasma Science: Long Pulse portfolio supports U.S. researchers who work in collaboration with foreign scientists to explore critical science and technology issues at the frontiers of magnetic fusion research. These collaborations take advantage of the unique capabilities of the most advanced overseas research facilities.

The purpose of the SCRI program is to address the critical needs of the specialty crop industry by awarding grants to support research and extension that address key challenges of national, regional, and multi-state importance in sustaining all components of food and agriculture, including conventional and organic food production systems.

The U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE) Solar Energy Technology Office (SETO) is seeking applications under this Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA) to fund applied research and development to enable the reduction of the levelized cost of electricity (LCOE) generated by concentrating solar power (CSP) to 6 ¢/kWh-electric or less, without subsidies. This FOA intends to develop integrated thermal system solutions to overcome the temperature limitations of current CSP systems, while lowering capital costs by enabling the use of advanced turbines and achieving a higher overall system efficiency in converting solar thermal energy into electricity. Applications to this FOA are expected to advance individual high temperature components which have been developed at lab scale, and test them as an integrated system at a multi-MW thermal scale that can accept solar thermal energy, store it, and efficiently deliver it to a working fluid at high temperature, representative of a high efficiency power cycle.

The States of Colorado, Utah, Wyoming and New Mexico (Upper Division States), through UCRC, have been working in parallel with Arizona, California and Nevada (Lower Division States) and public entities within the Colorado River Basin, and in conjunction with the Department of the Interior, Bureau of Reclamation (Reclamation), to develop and implement drought contingency options, as appropriate, to avoid or reduce the likelihood of reaching critical reservoir elevations at either Lake Powell or Lake Mead. On July 16, 2013, Don Ostler, Executive Director of UCRC, testified before a Senate Subcommittee, "The Colorado River Basin remains in a very severe 14 year drought, the continuation of which could drive Lake Powell to levels that threaten the ability to generate electrical power and Lake Mead to levels that require implementation of shortages within a few years."

The purpose of this competitive undergraduate scholarship grant program is to increase the multicultural diversity of the food and agricultural scientific and professional workforce, and advance the educational achievement of all Americans by providing competitive grants to colleges and universities.

This is a Special Notice advising interested parties that the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) is seeking comments and feedback to strengthen the attached draft Program Description (PD) for a prospective "Counter Wildlife Trafficking (CWT) activity. USAID anticipates a projected cost of $10 million over a five year period of performance subject to the availability of funds.

Research supported by the Division of Materials Research (DMR) focuses on advancing fundamental understanding of materials, materials discovery, design, synthesis, characterization, properties, and materials-related phenomena. DMR awards enable understanding of the electronic, atomic, and molecular structures, mechanisms, and processes that govern nanoscale to macroscale morphology and properties; manipulation and control of these properties; discovery of emerging phenomena of matter

Imaging systems are commonly used for conducting pavement evaluations. AASHTO Standard Practice for Collecting Images of Pavement Surfaces for Distress Detection (AASHTO Designation: PP 68) addresses the collection of images. However, there are no widely accepted methods for measuring the characteristics of pavement surface images (such as 2-dimensional optical images and 3-dimensional surface elevation images). There are also no widely accepted AASHTO standard practices for the calibration, certification, and verification of such images. Research is needed to identify the characteristics of surface images that are essential for pavement evaluation and develop methods for measuring these characteristics, and also to develop recommended standard practices for implementing these methods. This information will help highway agencies better evaluate image data collection systems and improve the process of pavement condition evaluation. The objectives of this research are to (1) identify and develop methods for measuring the characteristics of surface images used for pavement evaluation and analysis; and (2) develop recommended standard practices for the calibration, certification, and verification of such images, for consideration and adoption by AASHT

One of the conclusions of this review was that the National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) stormwater permit compliance requirements increasingly include pavement deicer constituents in stormwater discharges. As controls on aircraft deicing runoff have become more widespread and effective, focus on the relative contribution and influence of pavement deicing runoff has increased. The objective of this research is to develop a method to estimate the contributions of airfield pavement deicers and anti-icers to overall oxygen demand (BOD and COD) in stormwater discharges. The method should: Account for sources, fate and transport of airfield pavement deicers and anti-icers; Identify and quantify airfield pavement deicers and anti-icers contained in discharged waters; Account for contributions from other non-airfield pavement-related deicers and anti-icing activities; Be adaptable to background water chemistry, various geographies, airport configurations, soils, topography, climate, weather, and hydrology; Be scalable to levels of resource availability (e.g., data, time, money, personnel, expertise); and Produce output expressed as a percentage of overall BOD and COD attributable to airfield pavement deicers and anti-icers with levels of confidence, and identify uncertainties.

This CRISP 2.0 solicitation responds both to national needs on the resilience of critical infrastructures and to increasing NSF emphasis on transdisciplinary research. In this context, the solicitation is one element of the NSF-wide Risk and Resilience activity, with the overarching goal of advancing knowledge in support of improvement of the nation's infrastructure resilience. The devastating effects of recent disasters such as Hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria have underscored that a great deal remains to be done. In addition, CRISP 2.0 is aligned with the NSF-wide frontier thinking on convergence, characterized as "deep integration of knowledge, techniques, and expertise from multiple fields to form new and expanded frameworks for addressing scientific and societal challenges and opportunities".

The Biological and Environmental Research (BER) of the SC, U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) hereby announces its interest in receiving applications to support fundamental research towards enabling new bioimaging capabilities for the study of plant and microbial systems relevant to bioenergy research. New imaging instrumentation is needed to observe and characterize multiple metabolic processes occurring within the living plant and microbial systems relevant to bioenergy and bioproduct production from renewable biomass. These processes include, but are not limited to real-time dynamic imaging of metabolic pathways, the transport of materials within and among cellular organelles including plant-root and organismal interactions, enzyme function and cellular structures. Of interest is the development of multimodal imaging devices constructed by merging new, innovative and/or transformational improvements to existing capabilities which will enable simultaneous observations in synergistic combination with correlated structural and/or chemical imaging to interpret biological function in and among whole microbial or plant cells.