Co-funded Project Requirements

This section describes the additional metadata entry requirements for documenting projects and products that involved multiple SA regions or FWS programs, or were co-funded with the USGS Climate Adaptation Science Centers (CASCs) or other federal bureaus. SA metadata requirements and best practices described in Project Entry Guidance still apply, unless otherwise noted below.

Goals

The goals for these guidelines are:

1. to identify when a project is co-funded and which protocol to follow;
2. to maintain consistent, quality metadata records for projects and products across all FWS regions for inclusion in the SA Science Catalog;
3. to avoid duplicate reporting of the same funding dollars, while also allowing each regional program to fully describe its financial contribution and project support;
4. to avoid the appearance of duplicated research efforts between FWS and CASCs or other federal bureaus (see Policy Guidance)
5. and to clearly communicate the relationships between separate, but related, FWS and CASC funded projects to the public.

Terms

Multi-regional refers to a single project or product that is supported by more than one FWS region. Support may come in the form of collaboration, in-kind donations of effort, and/or funding allocations.

Multi-regional co-funded refers to a single project that is financially supported by more than one region.

Lead region refers to the region that was instrumental in initializing and administering a project. There can be only one lead region per project.

CASC co-funded refers to a single project or product that is supported by one or more FWS region and one or more USGS Climate Adaptation Science Centers (CASCs).

Matching refers to funds or in-kind donations of effort that are provided by organizations outside of FWS.

Project is a particular effort in a particular geography with specific outcomes.

Sub-project is an effort that is related to a project, but is distinctly different in some specific aspect, such as geography, goal, or product. A sub-project often expands the scope of a project or grows from a research need identified by the project (aka parent project). If two regions fund similar work in different geographical regions, or for different species with separate deliverables, then these are considered to be separate projects. If both projects are part of a larger effort, and/or administered from the same grant, and/or developed in collaboration with the same investigators, then these are sub-projects.

Scenario Descriptions

Collaborating Project: One Service region leads a project with joint support or cooperation in the form of advisory consultation or staff time from another region. The collaborating region(s) does not provide direct funding support.

Sub-Project (see definition above): One region (Region A) is the lead for a large project (parent project), while another region (Region B), funds a distinct sub-project effort or distinct deliverable of the large project. This scenario can apply to FWS-CASC parent projects and may include project continuations when new objectives or deliverables are described.

Multi-regional Co-funded Project: One region leads a project with funding support from another region(s). The project cannot be divided into distinct sub-projects.

FWS/CASC Co-funded Project: FWS region(s) and CASC(s) co-fund a project without distinct sub-projects or products.

See the flowchart below for identifying which protocol to follow.