Science to Management
CICEET’s competitive grants program focuses science on coastal management’s priority needs

About the Program
CICEET’s Environmental Technology Development (ETD) Program is a nationally-competitive research funding program that invests in the development and implementation of technology to monitor, manage, and prevent the contamination and degradation of coastal and estuarine waters and habitats.

Through this program, CICEET has sponsored more than 150 projects that focus scientific expertise on high priority coastal management problems and seek to develop tools that are not only technically innovative, but also of pragmatic use.

Each fall, CICEET invites Requests for Proposals (RFP) to this program. The RFP is open to U.S. scientists and innovators. Individual research awards in the last funding cycle averaged $124,000 annually.

A new approach
The needs of coastal managers have served as true north for the development of CICEET’s ETD Program since its inception. For our next RFP, we are planning a new approach, one that encourages early end user involvement and more strategically focuses our resources so they have the greatest impact.

CICEET is working with colleagues nationwide to clarify the social, political, and regulatory context of specific coastal management problems. Our goal is to identify the technical and non-technical bottlenecks that obstruct the development and application of potential solutions.

If the analysis indicates that new or enhanced technologies will have a beneficial impact on the problem, CICEET will design strategic funding opportunities to meet these needs.

As part of this process, we hope to identify opportunities for partnership with organizations that have missions complimentary to CICEET, such as NOAA’s National Estuarine Research Reserve System, the Alliance for Coastal Technologies, and the Coastal Services Center.

Pilot Funding Opportunity
CICEET will pilot a funding opportunity based on this new approach to needs assessment in an RFP to be released in fall of 2006. Successful proposals, which will be funded in 2007, will address the following goal:

Enhance the quality of land use planning tools and maximize their use by volunteer and elected planning officials, and professional, municipal, and regional staff.

To inform RFPs that will be released in 2007, CICCET is conducting an intensive needs analysis of the following coastal management challenges:

• Rapid Assessment in Beach Water Quality Monitoring: Managers require the ability to measure fecal indicator bacteria concentrations more quickly, with accuracy that is equal to, or better than, the current standard.
• Performance Evaluation of Low Impact Development Designs: Pollution reduction through the incorporation of LIDs into building practices has been cited as a potentially valuable tool in reducing the impacts of stormwater runoff. To use LIDs with greater efficacy, managers and planners require performance data on these systems, especially in regard to key pollutants and the critical factors that control a system’s long-term effectiveness.
• Cost-Effective Tools to Develop Sediment Quality Objectives: Since traditional sediment chemistry data has limited value for managing coastal ecosystems, many resource managers must define sediment quality based on chemistry, toxicity, and benthic community analyses. Managers require cost-effective tools to gather and interpret these data.

Learn More
Mr. Kalle Matso
CICEET Program Manager
603.862.3508
kalle.matso@unh.edu