One of the three grant opportunities the Iowa Water Center (IWC) facilitates submissions for each year is Water Resources Competitive Grants Program, sponsored by the US Army Corps of Engineer Institute for Water Resources (IWR). This year’s proposal deadline is a month earlier than last year – July 17, 2015. Here’s a few things you need to know about this program:
1) IWR works with Water Resources Research Institutes like IWC to help manage the submission process. What does that mean? Researchers are encouraged to work with their state institute director while developing their proposal. They must submit their proposal to the WRRI, who will review it before passing it along to IWR. This process allows for more coordinated water resources research in the state.
2) Funds are pretty limited and competitive for this opportunity: typically only 1-2 projects are awarded with a max budget of $200,000. The good news: no matching funds are required.
3) This opportunity is for applied investigative proposals. There are three objectives – collaboration between IWR and university scientists, dissemination and application of information, and training of scientists, engineer and policy makers in water resources. Priority areas vary from year to year – the FY2015 call has eight.
4) The funded project in FY2014 went to *drum roll, please* the University of Iowa, for the highly collaborative “Prototype Multi-Jurisdictional Decision Making Web Platform for Integrated Water Resources Management: From Interagency Collaboration to Implementation in the Iowa-Cedar Watershed.” Marian Muste with IIHR-Hydroscience & Engineering is the lead investigator.
For more information, please read the FY 2015 RFP – it’s fairly short and worth your while to peruse it to see if you know of a project that would be a good fit.
Finally, the most important note – if you plan to apply this year, you MUST contact the Iowa Water Center as soon as possible to let us know so we can be prepared to review and submit your project!