Curation of long-term avian data set for Guanica Forest

This is a special notice prepared in accordance with FAR 5.2 “Synopsis of Proposed Contract Actions”. There is no solicitation available at this time. Requests for a solicitation will receive no response. This proposed contract action is published to notify potential sources that the USDA Forest Service, the Guanica Netting Project, at Guanica, Puerto Rico, which intends to award a sole source firm-fixed price contract to Robert B. Waide (UIE: FFLKPJFL1NS1).

Closing date of Notice: Sunday, August 31st, 2025, at 1159PM (EST).

Size standards in number of employees 1,000

GENERAL:

The Guanica Netting Project has generated 50 years of data documenting changes in abundance of migrant and resident birds in the Guanica State Forest. These data exist in different formats including published papers, paper files, spreadsheets, and field notes that are under the control of multiple researchers (John Faaborg and colleagues, Judith Toms, and Wayne Arendt). The primary goal of this work is to prepare a unified data set that meets requirements for submission to the appropriate Forest Service data archive and that contains sufficient support information to be accessible to future generations of researchers. The challenges in achieving this goal involve identifying the sources and formats of existing data, obtaining relevant data from the owners, homogenizing the data into a single format, verifying that the combined dataset matches the field data, and creating metadata that will allow interpretation and re-use of the data.

These challenges should be addressed in three steps: 1) determine the scope of the task by identifying all sources and formats of relevant data and metadata and assessing the effort required to produce a unified data set; 2) acquire all data and metadata, create common data and metadata formats, unify the data, and carry out Quality Assurance (QA)/Quality Control (QC) protocols to verify data and metadata; and 3) submit data and metadata to the Forest Service archive.

POC: Rivera gonzalez, Nestor at nestor.riveragonzalez@usda.gov