FUNDING ANNOUNCEMENT: USACE-IWR/NIWR Water Resources Competitive Grants Program

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!

ONE WEEK TO GO! Iowa Water Conference Update

With one week left to go, we are just about all set for the 2015 Iowa Water Conference! A little hiccup with the website last week (thanks to a university-wide outage) had us answering a lot of calls and emails about registration last week, but everything is up and running and rarin’ to go. A few key points:

–Early registration (a $25 discount) has been extended to this Tuesday, February 24 at midnight.

–Oral research presentations – a chance to showcase your research in a 15 minute presentation during breakout sessions – are still being solicited until Tuesday at midnight also. (The online form does have a deadline of Feb 20 – please disregard.)

-We are offering an optional workshop on the front end of the conference again in 2015 (Monday from 8-10) – this year we’re learning about Portland, Oregon’s Green Infrastructure efforts. The fee for this workshop is $50, which you can select as an option during registration, or register onsite the day of.

-At the tail end of the conference (Tuesday from 3-5:30), we are hosting a listening session on behalf of FEMA related to the new Federal Flood Risk Management Standard. More details, including documents regarding the Standards and the Draft Implementation Guidelines, can be found at the Iowa Water Center website’s event listing.

-We have a GREAT list of exhibitors, both commercial and non-profit/educational. They are:

COMMERCIAL:

Non-profit/Educational:

That’s it for now – the long and short of it, if you haven’t registered, there’s still time! We have a fantastic program this year and wouldn’t want anyone to miss it.

H2 in the KnOw: IWC joins the blogosphere

The Iowa Water Center has been around since 1964. Blogging has been around since 1994. Twenty years is a long time for the two to have never met.

The staff at the Iowa Water Center is incredibly passionate about getting the word out about Iowa’s water – from research to practice, from policy to watershed management, from education to water careers. We value a science based approach to addressing Iowa’s water topics, and we are always looking for new ways to tell Iowa’s water story. Thus, the IWC blog, “H2 in the KnOw,” is born.

The goal of this blog is to spread the message of what’s happening in Iowa’s water world (and sometimes beyond). We reach out in a number of different ways already – our website, bi-monthly newsletter News Flow, Twitter, Facebook – but let’s face it, there is a lot going on with water, and we want this blog to  spark conversations, challenge our knowledge and fuel the excitement for water in ways that go beyond what we’re already doing.

With that, we invite you to join us. We’ll be publishing semi-weekly (maybe more, but never less), featuring some original content, offering insights to what others are doing, and giving guest bloggers an opportunity to share their take on Iowa water.

Thanks for having us, blogosphere.