The objective of this Statement of Need (SON) is to support mission readiness by developing and testing rigorous and broadly applicable approaches to evaluate how natural resource and training range management practices and strategies contribute to observed outcomes, as well as their cost effectiveness over relevant time horizons. These strategies and practices that aim to maintain installations often include a sequence of actions or activities over many years. Such activities of interest include but are not limited to vegetation management for mission-preferred conditions, grazing, controlling invasive taxa, habitat management for recovery of species populations, forestry operations, or recovery from past land use. Proposals may analyze and synthesize existing data to evaluate long-standing practices or strategies, develop and apply approaches to evaluate ongoing practices in specific settings, or both. This SON is not intended to support new resource management projects, but rather to leverage experience and long-term data from prior studies or ongoing management practices to develop generalizable approaches to rigorous evaluation. 

Proposals must include the following specific objectives: 

• Identify the specific resource management objectives that the strategies and practices being evaluated are intended to achieve, and the benefits of those objectives to DoW operations. 
• Define outcomes-based indicators to evaluate if intended resource-management objectives have been or are being achieved.  
• Design rigorous approaches to determine how management practices have contributed to observed outcomes over short and long-time scales (intended or not), and distinguish their effects from other mechanisms that could confound such causal inferences.  
• Apply performance indicators, methods, and measurements in a test evaluation of one or more types of management intervention intended to address the identified natural resource management challenge.  
• Identify the source and nature of data to be used, including data on pre-intervention conditions if an ongoing resource management project is being evaluated.  

Investigators are encouraged to build on databases developed in their study to develop a more general template that could eventually accumulate results from multiple case studies addressing the specified management challenge. This would facilitate subsequent broader analyses of how effectiveness and efficiency of interventions to address the specified management challenge depend on details of implementation and ecological, physical, social, management, and operational context.  

All proposals should include engagement with DoW installations, branch, and/or departments to ensure relevance. Longitudinal assessments leveraging past SERDP or other prior research on DoW installations are preferred. Although proposals may focus on a single installation, they should yield applications suitable for multiple installations or apply broadly to DoW Sentinel Landscapes. Proposals may also include off-installation data and practices, but relevance to DoW management objectives and benefits should be justified. 

The Department will benefit from systematic, reproducible, easily usable, and outcomes-based evaluation of long- term resource management practices on military installations. This investment should advance desired management objectives while maintaining cost-effectiveness. Development and adoption of standardized approaches will facilitate “built-in” evaluation of interventions conducted by busy installation resource managers and help promote future use of outcomes-based evaluation. Such evaluation will also motivate innovation where practices fall short of intended objectives. 

Effective management of natural infrastructure is important to DoW installations in fulfilling their missions for training and testing. Evaluation of whether resource management practices achieve their objectives and are cost-effective is vital for developing and refining practices and strategies that match the environmental and operational contexts across DoW installations. DoW installations face a wide range of environmental challenges as a result of past land use, invasive species, and unintended consequences of ongoing operations and past management. Despite much success in addressing such challenges at the local scale by DoW natural-resource managers, relatively few systematic evaluations of alternative practices and strategies are available to DoW and the broader natural resource management community to guide decision-making on appropriate interventions in specific contexts for specific purposes.  

The primary goal of this SON is thus to generate rigorous and broadly applicable evaluation approaches, criteria, and best practices that can be easily used by DoW managers, policy makers, and partners. A key requirement of the approaches to be developed is that they enable causal inference to evaluate the extent to which observed outcomes, particularly desirable ones, are attributable to intentional interventions by managers rather than resulting from confounding variables concomitant with the intervention.  

Often missing from past work is an explicit incorporation of all critical elements listed in the objectives above into general protocols that address the following components: research design; data and metadata needs for implementation of management strategies (e.g., treatments, intensities, frequencies, sequencing, or areal coverage), investigation of mechanisms (e.g., types of non-intervention controls, data-supported counter-factuals), and ecological outcomes (e.g., population size of target species); uncertainty characterization methods; data curation and archiving templates; and communication products. Furthermore, without the effort to characterize variables describing the ecological, physical, social, management, and operational contexts, conclusions could confound or complicate interpretation of outcomes and mechanisms of interventions.  

By addressing these knowledge gaps, if these approaches become widely used, the resulting data will inform broader evaluations across other systems that assess if and how success of different practices depends on the biological (e.g., species and ecosystems), physical (e.g., weather, topography, substrate), and management (e.g., staffing levels and expertise available) environment, as well as on details of how treatments are implemented and on the operational context of DoW installations.  

The cost and time to meet the requirements of this SON are at the discretion of the proposer. Two options are available:  

Standard Proposals: These proposals describe a complete research effort. The proposer should incorporate the appropriate time, schedule, and cost requirements to accomplish the scope of work proposed. SERDP projects normally run from two to five years in length and vary considerably in cost consistent with the scope of the effort. It is expected that most proposals will fall into this category.  

Limited Scope Proposals: Proposers with innovative approaches to the SON that entail high technical risk or have minimal supporting data may submit a Limited Scope Proposal for funding up to $350,000 and approximately one year in duration. Such proposals may be eligible for follow-on funding if they result in a successful initial project. The objective of these proposals should be to acquire the data necessary to demonstrate proof-of-concept or reduction of risk that will lead to development of a future Standard Proposal. Proposers should submit Limited Scope Proposals in accordance with the SERDP Core Solicitation instructions and deadlines. 

Mr. J. Kevin Hiers 

SERDP & ESTCP Program Manager 

Resource Management and Resilience 

Email: john.k.hiers.civ@mail.mil