Cooperative Agreement for affiliated Partner with the Great Lakes Northern Forrest Cooperative Ecosystem Studies Unit
This cooperative agreement funds research for a CESU partner to improve accuracy assessment and area estimation methods for USGS annual remote-sensing land-cover monitoring and NLCD products.
⚑ Eligible applicants must be participating partners of the Great Lakes Northern Forrest Cooperative Ecosystem Studies Unit (CESU). · Cooperative agreement with USGS EROS; emphasis is on land-cover monitoring methods, accuracy assessment, and area estimation rather than service delivery. · Award ceiling is $135,000.
This is a remote-sensing/statistical methods project for land-cover monitoring, accuracy assessment, and area estimation. It is environmental in a broad sense, but it is not the team’s public-opinion, risk-perception, warning, energy, or education-policy research line, so it is not a plausible PI-level fit for IPPRA.
JUDGED AGAINST THE ROSTER'S PUBLICATION DOSSIER · GPT-5.4-MINI · 2026-11-03
Unit fits — one characterization, each unit's own rules
| Physical Sciences & Engineering (demo) | 75 strong | technical depth: central; funds applied research |
| IPPRA | 58 good | portfolio topic: environment (primary); social/behavioral work is minor; funds applied research; university can only partner, not lead |
| Tom Love Innovation Hub | 30 weak | funds applied research; deep-tech content |
Description
The USGS is offering a funding opportunity to a CESU partner for research in improving accuracy assessment and area estimation for use in annual remote-sensing based land-cover monitoring.
The Earth Resources Observation and Science (EROS) Center is a remotely sensed data management, systems development, and science center for the U.S. Geological Survey's (USGS) National Land Imaging Program. The USGS EROS has long been at the forefront of land cover research at local to global geographies. The USGS is modernizing its land cover monitoring capabilities and is enabling artificial intelligence, machine learning, and modeling for the detection of land change and the characterization of land cover at any time in the Landsat satellite record. The USGS is offering a funding opportunity to a CESU partner for research centered on improvements in land cover research by focusing on investigating and implementing state-of-the-art sampling and statistical strategies for accuracy assessment and area estimation, and the impacts of reference data uncertainties. This will be critical for characterizing the validity of USGS land cover change products such as the Annual National Land Cover Database (NLCD) which is used by other federal agencies, agencies of State, tribal, and local governments, institutes of higher education, and the private sector.
Eligibility
This financial assistance opportunity is being issued under a Cooperative Ecosystem Studies Units (CESU) Program. CESU's are partnerships that provide research, technical assistance, and education. Eligible recipients must be a participating partner of the Great Lakes Northern Forrest Cooperative Ecosystem Studies Unit.
Apply
View on Grants.gov → CONTACT: Geological Survey <Rachel_miller@ios.doi.gov>
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