Research and Development to Support the Interagency Monitoring of Protected Visual Environments (IMPROVE) - Enhancing the Quality and Scope of Aerosol Data Collection | P18AS00529

Opportunity Information: Apply for P18AS00529

The grant opportunity titled "Research and Development to Support the Interagency Monitoring of Protected Visual Environments (IMPROVE) - Enhancing the Quality and Scope of Aerosol Data Collection" is a National Park Service (Department of the Interior) cooperative agreement focused on strengthening how aerosol pollution is measured and interpreted in protected areas. The IMPROVE network is widely used to track visibility and fine particle pollution that affects national parks and other scenic environments, and the central goal here is to ensure that the data are reliable enough to support long-term trend analyses and air quality management decisions. Because policy decisions often depend on whether measured changes are real atmospheric shifts or artifacts introduced by changing instruments, laboratory methods, site practices, or data handling, the work emphasizes both scientific rigor and practical network operations.

A major portion of the effort is dedicated to enhanced data quality assurance with an explicit emphasis on long-term trends. The work is aimed at making it easier to visualize and characterize data quality over time and to interpret trends with a clear understanding of what is driving them. That includes quantifying uncertainty and detection limits, which is critical when concentrations are near the lower bounds of what instruments can reliably measure. It also includes examining relationships among different measurements (for example, how chemical species co-vary, how sampling artifacts might influence multiple components, or how method shifts can create step changes). The opportunity highlights the development of improved tools to monitor data quality in near-real time or at least quickly enough to flag emerging measurement problems before they propagate through long datasets. In practical terms, this means better diagnostics, better performance indicators, and better methods for identifying when a site, sampler, laboratory batch, or analytical procedure is drifting out of specification.

Another core focus is analytical method development, specifically chemical speciation methods used to determine what aerosols are made of. IMPROVE-style monitoring relies on speciated particulate matter data (for example, elemental carbon, organic carbon, sulfate, nitrate, soil-related elements, trace metals) to explain sources and processes and to link changes in visibility to emission trends. The grant supports improving existing methods or developing new ones to keep pace with evolving technology and scientific understanding. These improvements are framed as a way to maintain or enhance data quality, expand the amount of useful information extracted from each collected sample, and potentially reduce costs. The underlying idea is that better and more efficient lab methods can increase confidence in the dataset while also enabling new scientific questions to be answered from the same physical filters and samples.

The opportunity also supports sampling method improvements. As field technology changes and the IMPROVE and Chemical Speciation Network (CSN) gain operational experience, there is ongoing interest in refining how samples are collected, handled, and stored. The grant anticipates evaluating new or modified sampling approaches for possible adoption in one or both networks. Testing and evaluation would occur both in controlled research settings at the University of California, Davis and, as appropriate, at actual IMPROVE and/or CSN monitoring sites. This combination is meant to ensure that proposed innovations are not only scientifically sound in the lab, but also robust in real-world conditions where weather, site logistics, operator variability, and long deployment periods can expose weaknesses that short trials might miss.

Outreach and communication is treated as a required operational pillar rather than an afterthought. The monitoring networks depend on participation from the National Park Service and other partner units, along with site operators who conduct day-to-day sampling and basic checks. The grant describes a continuing effort to keep these participants informed through sharing analytical results with operators and other stakeholders, creating training materials for site operators and data validators, and generally strengthening the feedback loop between the central analytical teams and the field. Beyond internal network communication, the results are intended to be shared with the broader scientific community through workshops, conference presentations, and peer-reviewed publications, reinforcing that this work is both applied (supporting regulatory and management needs) and research-driven (advancing methods and interpretation).

Administratively, this was issued as a discretionary funding opportunity (CFDA 15.945) using a cooperative agreement mechanism under the National Park Service. The funding opportunity number is P18AS00529, with an award ceiling of $812,958 and an expectation of one award. It was posted in August 2018 as a notice of intent to partner with the University of California, Davis through the California Cooperative Ecosystem Studies Unit, and it explicitly states that no open applications would be accepted. In other words, it functioned as a planned partnership action to support specialized research and network-support activities rather than a competitive grant open to the general applicant pool.

• The Department of the Interior, National Park Service in the natural resources sector is offering a public funding opportunity titled "Research and Development to Support the Interagency Monitoring of Protected Visual Environments (IMPROVE) - Enhancing the Quality and Scope of Aerosol Data Collection" 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 Aug 15, 2018.
• Applicants must submit their applications by Notice of intent to partner with University of CA, Davis under the California Cooperative Ecosystem Studies Unit. No applications will be accepted.. (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 $812,958.00 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).

Apply for P18AS00529

[Watch] Creating a grant proposal using the step-by-step wizard inside the applicant portal: