Cooperative Agreement for CESU-affiliated Partner with Californian Cooperative Ecosystem Studies Unit | G24AS00385

Opportunity Information: Apply for G24AS00385

This grant opportunity (Funding Opportunity Number G24AS00385) is a US Geological Survey (USGS) discretionary funding call structured as a cooperative agreement, meaning the work is expected to be carried out with substantial involvement and collaboration from USGS staff rather than as a fully independent, hands-off award. It falls under the Science and Technology and other Research and Development activity category and is listed under CFDA 15.808. The program is being offered through the Cooperative Ecosystem Studies Unit (CESU) framework, which is designed to connect federal agencies with partner institutions for applied research, technical support, and education that directly serve public resource management and science needs.

The core focus is research on using artificial intelligence that is "informed by explicit semantics" to improve how USGS conducts scientific assessments. In practical terms, this points toward AI methods that do not rely only on pattern recognition or black-box text generation, but that also incorporate structured meaning: things like formal ontologies, knowledge graphs, controlled vocabularies, and explicit representations of relationships among concepts, data sources, and evidence. USGS is emphasizing this because their assessments in areas such as energy resources, minerals, biodiversity, and other national natural resource assets are often legislatively mandated and must be defensible, traceable, and up to date with the full body of available data and knowledge. The agency is signaling that the volume and pace of information has become difficult to manage with traditional workflows, and that semantics-aware AI could help maintain currency, consistency, and transparency.

A central idea in the description is the development of "AI scientists," described as intelligent agents operating within a technology framework that can iteratively improve as generative AI and related tools advance. The intent is not a one-time model build, but an approach where the AI capability is repeatedly updated across new generations of models and is trained and refined through regular, adaptive interaction with USGS scientists. This implies a human-in-the-loop design where USGS subject matter experts continuously guide the system, correct it, and help it learn agency-specific standards for evidence, uncertainty, terminology, and assessment practices. The deliverables would likely support assessment workflows such as literature and data discovery, extraction and summarization of findings with provenance, mapping claims to evidence, identifying gaps or inconsistencies, tracking updates over time, and producing structured outputs that can feed into reports while keeping an auditable chain from conclusions back to source material.

Eligibility is limited: applicants must be participating partners of the Californian Cooperative Ecosystem Studies Unit (CESU) Program, and the eligible applicant category is listed as "Others" to reflect that CESU partnerships include universities, research organizations, and other qualified entities that are formal CESU members. In other words, this is not an open competition to all institutions; it is restricted to the Californian CESU network. The opportunity was created on 2024-06-05, and the original application closing date is 2024-07-15.

Funding is capped at an award ceiling of $499,999. The listing does not specify the exact number of expected awards in the provided source text, but the ceiling indicates a mid-sized applied research project suited to building and demonstrating a working framework, prototype, or pilot capability rather than a large multi-year program. Because it is a cooperative agreement, prospective applicants should expect coordination requirements, shared project planning, regular technical check-ins, and iterative development aligned to real USGS assessment needs. Overall, the opportunity is aimed at accelerating and improving the rigor of USGS scientific assessments by combining generative AI with explicit semantic structures so that AI-assisted outputs are more interpretable, traceable, and usable in high-stakes public resource decision contexts.

• The Geological Survey in the science and technology and other research and development sector is offering a public funding opportunity titled "Cooperative Agreement for CESU-affiliated Partner with Californian Cooperative Ecosystem Studies Unit" and is now available to receive applicants.
• Interested and eligible applicants and submit their applications by referencing the CFDA number(s): 15.808.
• This funding opportunity was created on 2024-06-05.
• Applicants must submit their applications by 2024-07-15. (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 $499,999.00 in funding.
• Eligible applicants include: Others.

Apply for G24AS00385

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