CUAHSI announced in February the six winners of the 2010 Pathfinder Fellowship Awards. Graduate training in hydrologic science typically focuses on a single field site or single modeling approach. To assist graduate students in enriching their research program by moving beyond a "one site, one view" approach to research, the Pathfinder Fellowship awards provide travel support for graduate students to make an extended visit to conduct field research at an additional site or to collaborate with a research group using alternate modeling methods of those in a graduate student's current research program.

This year's fellowship awardees are:

• Nikolaos Apsilidis, Virginia Tech, Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering
• Ricardo Gonzalez-Pinzon, Oregon State University, Department of Geosciences
• Annelen Kahl, University of California, Santa Barbara, Bren School of Environmental Science & Management
• Christa Kelleher, Pennsylvania State University, Department of Civil Engineering
• Avirup Sen Gupta, Utah State University, Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering
• Hal Voepal, Desert Research Institute, Reno, Hydrologic Sciences

Congratulations to the awardees! For more information on the Pathfinder Fellowship Program, please visit our Pathfinder page.

The NSF recently released a Solicitation for a new round of Science and Technology Centers. Many of the scientific challenges faced by water science and surface earth processes occur at disciplinary interfaces. STC's present a unique opportunity to address these challenges with sustained funding—up to $5M/yr for up to 10 years.

CUAHSI can assist in various community aspects of your proposed STC:

1. Data services—to make data collected by your center more broadly available to the community
2. Instrumentation nodes—to access or to provide access to instrumentation
3. Community access—to engage the community through our communication outlets
4. Meeting services—to use the CUAHSI Biennial Meeting as a platform to describe your center's activities

These services are available to all proposing teams on an equal basis and for the broad variety of disciplines that are interested in water science—surface earth processes, engineering, ecology, economics, etc.

As you prepare your pre-proposal, we have assembled other resources that might be helpful. Two STC's have been funded in the water and surface earth process areas: NCED (University of Minnesota) and SAHRA (University of Arizona). In the spirit of community support, these centers have made pre-proposals, proposals and reporting documents available for interested parties to review at www.sahra.arizona.edu/publications/ and www.nced.umn.edu/content/official-documents.

Getting friendly reviews of your pre-proposal is very important because the competition is quite robust. If you are having difficulties locating reviewers, please contact Rick Hooper (exdir@cuahsi.org) and include the title and project summary of your proposal if you would like assistance in finding reviewers.

On February 25th, CUAHSI hosted an online Question and Answer session with Drs. Soroosh Sorooshian (SAHRA, now at UC Irvine) and Efi Foufoula-Georgiou (NCED, University of Minnesota. The session was attended by over 40 participants, who were able to hear Drs. Foufoula-Georgiou's and Sorooshian's advice based on their own experiences proposing and directing STCs. Both presenters also expressed willingness to provide advice in the future. Introductory comments from CUAHSI and Dr. Foufoula were recorded and are available at cuahsi.acrobat.com/p64036764/. Please contact Rick Hooper (exdir@cuahsi.org) if you would like additional information.

JUNE 8-10, 2011 — National Conservation Training Center — Shepardstown, WV

Developing networks of optical sensors in rivers, lakes and streams that report comparable data across and between sites remains an important challenge. To help address this challenge, the USGS Office of Water Quality and CUAHSI are co-sponsoring a three-day workshop that will assemble a diverse group of scientists and managers to identify opportunities and begin developing community standards for making Nationally-consistent, high-quality environmental measurements with optical sensors. The workshop will cover the complete "life cycle" of sensor deployment: from site and network design to data transmission and management through visualization and analysis. Specifically, the purpose is to initiate an ongoing discussion that will:

1. identify the near- and long-term uses and capabilities for in situ optical data,
2. identify the critical needs (infrastructure, data analysis, etc.) required to implement in situ optical sensors in existing and planned networks,
3. identify the steps to optimize the application of in situ optical sensor deployments in rivers and streams,
4. develop guidelines for instrument performance, calibration and validation, and
5. develop a vision for the next generation of optical sensors needed to support water-quality monitoring in rivers and streams.

This workshop is designed for (1) senior researchers, policy makers, and program directors with a demonstrated interest in continuous water-quality monitoring, and/or integrated monitoring networks, but with little or no experience with in situ optical sensors; (2) researchers with experience in the application of in situ optical instruments in monitoring and process-level research; and (3) vendor representatives who have field research and application experience. Participation is limited to 40 participants. A formal workshop announcement and registration will follow soon. Those interested can also contact Jennifer Arrigo, CUAHSI program manager, (jarrigo@cuahsi.org) for more information.

February 25, 2011; 3:00pm ET

• Larry Murdoch, Clemson University
  Title: Protecting Coastal Cities from Catastrophic Flooding

March 11, 2011; 3:00pm ET

• David Letson, University of Miami
  Title: Economics of Natural Disasters

April 1, 2011; 3:00pm ET

• Sankar Arugum, North Carolina State University
  Title: Climate Forecasts and Water Management: Opportunities and Challenges

April 15, 2011; 3:00pm ET

• Laurence Smith, University of California, Los Angeles
  Title: The New North: Four Forces Shaping our Northern Future

For additional information about CUAHSI cyberseminars, please go to the Cyberseminars page.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has instituted a new data management plan (DMP) requirement for all proposals submitted on or after January 18, 2011 (see nsf.gov/bfa/dias/policy/dmp.jsp for full details). A data management plan of up to two pages must now be included with your NSF proposal that details the storage, archiving and dissemination plans for data resulting from NSF-funded projects.

CUAHSI has expertise in data storage and management, and can provide certain services to your project at no cost. We have compiled the following guidance based on NSF's Grant Proposal Guide that may assist you in completing your data management plan. Because this is a new requirement, we do not know what will be considered acceptable by reviewers and cannot guarantee that these recommendations are adequate, even though we believe they are appropriate. Based upon our discussions with Earth Sciences division at NSF, there will be considerable flexibility in what are considered acceptable data management plans until more experience is gained. It is most important at this stage to demonstrate that you have considered data management and have a strategy.

The CUAHSI-Hydrologic Information System (CUAHSI-HIS) group has several services available to the community that can address many aspects of data management, and has also developed software and guidance for using commercial and standards based software that can help you manage your own data to fulfill this requirement.

We encourage investigators to use and quote this information as needed, and to contact and collaborate with CUAHSI-HIS on addressing their data management plan needs. Inquiries should be directed to exidr@cuahsi.org.

For more information and the full set of guidelines, please visit our Data Management Plan page.