CUAHSI’s Instrumentation Discovery Travel Grant (IDTG) program enables scientists to learn the details of hydrologic instrument installation, operation, maintenance, and data processing by visiting experts or scheduling reverse site visits.
Applicants from traditionally under-served institutions, primarily undergraduate institutions, students at all levels, and early career faculty are encouraged to apply for an IDTG.
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CUAHSI offers up to $1,000 to help cover travel expenses for students or scientists at U.S. universities and colleges to visit colleagues with specific instrumentation expertise. The objective of the travel should be to efficiently and economically learn how to build, install, operate, maintain, and process data from one or more hydrologic instruments. IDTG’s can: (1) enable university students or scientists to visit other institutions and/or research sites, or (2) enable a reverse site visit to bring an expert to an institution.
These grants are intended to minimize the financial risk for awardees while enabling them to learn about advanced water-related instrumentation from an expert. Grantees are expected to take a holistic approach. As needed, they should learn about field deployment, instrument networking, data collection methods, data interpretation approaches, and learn about operating the instrumentation under different environmental conditions from anecdotal experiences of the host. We ask that awardees use CUAHSI's Water Data Services to publish any datasets that result from an IDTG.
Priority will be given to proposals that focus on learning to use instruments, sensors, and/or devices. Click here to view hydrologic instrumentation facilities that may be useful in developing your proposal. Learning field methods or laboratory protocols is permissible, but must be done with a focus on instrumentation and within the context of a demonstrable need (i.e., there is not a learning opportunity at your home institution or you seek to evaluate if this is the instrument for you prior to purchase). For this reason, standard field or lab techniques that rely on common tools and methods are not prioritized by this solicitation (e.g., weighing, microscopes, grab sampling) unless there is a demonstrable absence of expertise at the awardee's institution. This grant opportunity is not appropriate for funding attendance of a class or workshop. Proposals that include modeling activities associated with processing of instrument data will be considered, but site visits requested purely to learn or evaluate modeling software are outside the scope of this program.
When preparing your IDTG proposal, remember that the overarching intent of this grant is to build capacity related to specific instrumentation by giving you access to learning opportunities that would otherwise be challenging to obtain. In the proposal narrative, please be specific and direct about the nature of the instrumentation and the associated challenges to learning about its operation. If your expected expenses for travel are over $1,000, please provide information on how you will obtain the remaining budget.