A New Year, a New Posting Schedule and IWRC Updates

When we first launched the blog, we planned to post once a week on Wednesdays. If you’ve followed us for any amount of time, you’ve probably noticed that we haven’t kept that schedule, ever. But, with a new year comes the opportunity to readjust. Consequently, we’ve decided to start posting on the second and forth Thursdays of a month. News items, PSAs, funding announcements, calls for papers, and so on will be posted as needed. Those items will also continue to be posted on our Facebook page and Twitter feed, so for regular updates and content from your friendly Illinois Water Resources Center, please like us on Facebook or follow us @IllinoisWater. If you have items you would like posted to any of these outlets, feel free to contact us through Facebook, Twitter, or good, old-fashioned email: iwrc[at]uiuc.edu or cmlay[at]Illinois.edu.

And now, a few big news items for 2014:

• Save the Date: Water 2014 is coming! We are pleased to announce that Water 2014 will take place October 14^th and 15^th at the Illini Union on the University of Illinois campus. More details to follow, but feel free to contact us if you have ideas or would like to sponsor a portion of the event.
• National Competitive Grants Program: It seems that funding will most likely be available this year for the Water Resources Research National Competitive Grants Program. As we’ve noted on our blog and social media outlets, these applications are due to us February 20^th. Please contact us if you have questions or would like help preparing your application. The full RFP is available on the NIWR webpage.
• Keep an eye out for our Annual Small Grants: We are working on final details for our own RFP, so check our blog, website, and social media for new details from us.

National Competitive Grants Request for Proposals [104(g)]

Illinois investigators, it’s time to think about proposals for the National Competitive Grants program!

The National Competitive Grants Program is funded through collaboration between the National Institutes of Water Resources and the U.S. Geological Survey. It provides 1 to 3 year grants of up to $250,000 to projects addressing: research on the topic of improving and enhancing the nation’s water supply, including evaluation of innovative approaches to water treatment, infrastructure design, retrofitting, maintenance, management, and replacement; evaluation of the dynamics of extreme hydrological events and associated costs; development of methods for better estimation of the physical and economic supply of water; alternative approaches and governance mechanisms for integrated management of ground and surface waters; and the evaluation and assessment of conservation practices.

•  Collaboration between USGS scientists and applicants is not only encouraged, but proposals showing extensive collaboration will be given more weight in evaluations.
• Investigators must have a match of non-federal dollars for any federal dollars requested in proposals. Investigator salary may be used as a match.
• Any investigator at an institution of higher learning can apply for the grant, but he or she must do so through the Water Center or Institute in his or her state. For example, Illinois researchers must submit their applications to the Illinois Water Resources Center, and should contact us before February 20^th to arrange that submission.  
• Applications are due by 3pm Central Time on February 20, 2014
• Funding for these grants depends on appropriations from the federal government. If money isn’t allocated to USGS for these awards, then grants may not be funded.
•  For the complete RFP, please visit NIWR’s website.

If you have any questions about this request for proposals or want to submit an application, please contact IWRC at iwrc@uiuc.edu. 

More Grants, Scholarships, and Awards

We posted a list of Illinois funding opportunities for students back in July, but since we are unable to offer our Annual Small Grants this year due to Sequester budget cuts, we hope this list of national and international opportunities can provide even more support ideas. If we missed your organizations’ scholarships, please contact us. In no particular order:

• Our colleagues over in Illinois-Indiana Sea Grant provide access for Illinois and Indiana students to the Knauss Marine Policy Fellowship, the Great Lakes Commission/Sea Grant Fellowship, NOAA Fisheries Services/Sea Grant Fellowships, and the CILER Great Lakes Summer Students Fellowships. While most of these awards provide research funding or experiences for current graduate student, there are some undergraduate opportunities available. Check their website regularly for open fellowships and advice on applications.       
• The Society of Freshwater Science makes several aquatic ecology awards to organization member graduate students. Award applications are due in February 2014 and range from support for taxonomic research to travel funds to attend annual meetings. 
• The Soil and Water Conservation Society provides scholarship to traditional students as well as working professionals who seek to add to their professional credentials. Applicants must be members of SWCS. Full information is available here.
• The Water Environment Federation (WEF) provides monetary awards to WEF members attending graduate school. Applicants must be members of WEF, pursing a career/degree in the water environment field, and use scholarship funds for tuition, board, or books, but not wages or a stipend.     
• Engineering firm Brown and Caldwell offers several scholarships to students in engineering or environmental science fields. The Minority Scholarship is for junior, senior, and graduate minority students with a GPA over 3.0 attending an accredited college or university. The Eckenfelder Scholarship is open to all students, but has similar requirements as the Minority Scholarship. Applications are due April 15^th of each year.       
• If you’re interested in a master’s degree in environmental engineering and are willing to promise to work for two years in the that field, you should consider applying to the Environmental Engineers of the Future program. Applicants must have a BS in engineering from an accredited university and have chosen, and been accepted into, a graduate program by spring of 2014. Applications are due December 1. 
• Even more engineering scholarships are listed on the American Society of Civil Engineers' webpage. While the requirements and deadlines differ among these opportunities, you do, generally, have to be pursing a degree in civil engineering.
• The Society of Women Geographers provides several fellowship opportunities to “women studying for advanced degrees in geography or its allied fields.” Pruitt National Fellowship applications are due in February of 2014.
• The American Geophysical Union awards several travel grants and scholarships to student members. While most of the scholarship applications are due in June, it is never too early to start planning and preparing your ideas.
• Don’t forget about the U.S. EPA’s Science to Achieve Results (STAR) Fellowships. For master’s and PhD students, the awards provide tuition, stipend, and expenses for several years for research. They’re not currently accepting scholarships for the 2014 school year, but keep an eye on their website for future updates.   
• And finally, the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program provides support to graduate students in many, many types of programs. While very competitive, these awards are still well worth pursuing and are due very soon!

Bringing Water Science to the People of Illinois

We’ve been neglecting the blog lately, which would be sad in and of itself, if it didn’t also mean that we have been out of the office doing vast amounts of outreach. What kinds of outreach, you say? We’re so glad you asked.

You may have noticed our many postings about the Drought Workshop at the Governor’s Conference on the Management of the Illinois River System. What you may not have noticed is that this workshop was developed because of outreach requirements on a research grant.  Last spring, Dr. Ximing Cai approached us with the idea of a drought workshop, because he was concerned that his research on forecasting and climate wasn’t reaching the people who needed it most, namely, farmers and water resources managers. Since the mission of the Illinois Water Resources Center is to bring watershed science to the people of Illinois, we were excited to help Dr. Cai reach a broader audience.  And we’re happy to report that we did host a broad audience. Members of Illinois’ agriculture, economics, and natural resources departments joined with researchers for the University of Illinois and the Prairie Research Institute to discuss what information they needed to help them do their jobs during droughts. Over 30 people attended the workshop, and this was during a partial federal government shutdown that kept three of our speakers at home. While we missed their input, it was encouraging to see how many people are interested in managing drought more effectively in Illinois. Stay tuned for a report and white paper on this topic to be published on our website.

The other task that’s been keeping us so busy (including talking about it in our sleep, by one report) is nutrient pollution. Illinois is home to an impressive agriculture scene and a lot of people, most of whom live in the Chicago area. These two factors mean that Illinois puts a lot of nitrogen and phosphorous into our waterways in the form of escaped fertilizer and treated wastewater. These nutrients eventually make their way down the Mississippi River and into the Gulf of Mexico, where they greatly contribute to the massive hypoxia, or dead, zones that have been appearing there for over 30 years. The State of Illinois is now working on reducing this form of pollution by developing a nutrient reduction strategy with the aid of a group of stakeholders. Led by the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency and the Illinois Department of Agriculture, the stakeholder group includes representative from wastewater treatment professionals, the agricultural community, and environmental groups, and has become large. Which is where we come in. Big groups require a lot of organization to make them run efficiently and still let everyone’s ideas and opinions be heard. Consequently, IWRC is facilitating the working group meetings to ensure that Illinois drafts a workable strategy to meaningfully reduce nutrient pollution in a way that addresses everyone’s concerns and includes the expertise of all the group members. As you can imagine, curating the content generated by nearly 50 people has taken a lot of work, but it promises to be a rewarding experience, and we hope to see the finished project next summer. For more information on the Nutrient Reduction Strategy, you can visit the IEPA website.

To round out our outreach efforts, we’ve also started preparing for Illinois Water 2014! If you have ideas of activities, sections, and events you’d like to see included, please contact us.    

Drought Workshop Notes

We're excited to see that our Drought Workshop was written up on the Illinois-Indiana Sea Grant blog. Check it out here to find out how the day went. We'll be posting the final notes and ideas from the workshop soon. Until then, if you have additional ideas post-workshop (or couldn't make it) feel free to email us with your comments to be incorporated into our final publication.