[Federal Register Volume 80, Number 194 (Wednesday, October 7, 2015)]
[Notices]
[Pages 60710-60712]
From the Federal Register Online via the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
[FR Doc No: 2015-25319]


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DEPARTMENT OF THE INTERIOR

Bureau of Reclamation

[RR0810000, 15XR0680A1, RY.1541CH20.1430001]


Announcement of Requirements and Registration for a Prize 
Competition Seeking Methods or Devices That can Quantify Drift 
Invertebrates in River and Estuary Systems

AGENCY: Bureau of Reclamation, Interior.

ACTION: Notice.

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SUMMARY: The Bureau of Reclamation, in collaboration with other federal 
agencies (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration-National 
Marine Fisheries Service, U.S. Geological Survey, U.S. Fish and 
Wildlife Service, and U.S. Army Corps of Engineers) is announcing a 
prize competition for seeking a way to economically detect, count, and 
identify zooplankton and drift invertebrates in river and estuary 
systems. Problems identified that prevent the simple transfer of 
oceanographic techniques to rivers and streams are higher water 
velocities, turbidity, higher surface/depth ratio, and costs (time and 
money).

DATES: Listed below are the specific dates pertaining to this prize 
competition:
    1. Submission period begins on October 7, 2015.
    2. Submission period ends on November 16, 2015.
    3. Judging period ends on January 15, 2016.
    4. Winners announced by January 29, 2016.

ADDRESSES: The Quantifying Drift Invertebrates in River and Estuary 
Systems Prize Competition will be posted on the following crowd-
sourcing platforms where Solvers can register for this prize 
competition:
    1. The Water Pavilion located at the InnoCentive Challenge Center: 
https://www.innocentive.com/ar/challenge/browse.
    2. U.S. Federal Government Challenge Platform: www.Challenge.gov.
    3. The Nature Open Innovation Pavilion at http://www.nature.com/openinnovation/index.html.
    4. The Scientific American Citizen Science Center at http://www.scientificamerican.com/citizen-science/.
    InnoCentive, Inc. is administering this challenge under a challenge 
support services contract with the Bureau of Reclamation. These Web 
sites will re-direct the Solver community to the InnoCentive Challenge 
Center as the administrator for this prize competition. Additional 
details for this prize competition, including the Challenge Agreement 
specific for this prize competition, can be accessed through any of 
these prize competition web addresses. The Challenge Agreement contains 
more details of the prize competition rules and terms that Solvers must 
agree with to be eligible to compete.

FOR FURTHER INFORMATION CONTACT: Challenge Manager: Dr. David Raff 
Science Advisor, Bureau of Reclamation, (202) 513-0516, [email protected]; 
or Mr. Chuck Hennig, (303) 445-2134, [email protected].

SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The Bureau of Reclamation is announcing this 
prize competition in compliance with 15 U.S. Code 3719, Prize 
Competitions. Habitat restoration, improvement, and creation in rivers, 
streams, and estuaries are key elements for the recovery of salmon, 
trout, and other critical fish species in the United States. Millions 
of dollars are spent annually on activities such as manipulating flow 
regimes, adding structural elements such as wood or rock, reconnecting 
rivers with their floodplains, and restoring wetlands. A critical 
aspect in evaluating the effectiveness of these habitat manipulations 
is understanding how they influence the food resources available to 
critical fish species targeted for recovery and protection. Yet despite 
its importance, quantification of food resources has proven difficult.
    A solution is being pursued through a prize competition because the 
Bureau of Reclamation and the collaborating Federal agencies want to 
seek innovative solutions from those beyond the usual sources of 
potential solvers and experts that commonly work in the fish recovery 
management domain. We find ourselves often wondering if somebody, 
somewhere may know a better way to quantify the availability of food 
sources for threatened and endangered fish. The prize competition 
approach enables us to reach new sources of potential solvers to 
discover other technologies that could be adopted for this purpose; or 
generate new solutions that would not likely be accomplished by 
standard contractual methods.
    Challenge Summary: Accurate food counts, such as zooplankton and 
drift invertebrates, are instrumental in fish habitat evaluation and 
restoration in our rivers and streams. Although technology has been 
developed for automated detection and identification of zooplankton and 
drift invertebrates in oceanographic settings, they have not been 
developed for the unique environmental conditions in rivers and 
estuaries. High flow rates and turbidity cause problems with automated 
visual systems used today. The main obstacle in estuaries is turbidity 
while the main obstacle in river systems is flow velocity. In addition, 
the horizontal nature of rivers invokes problems not encountered in 
deep ocean waters (e.g., sunlight effects at the surface of water and 
the mixing of food sources throughout the water column in rivers due to 
turbulence as opposed to more stratified food webs in ocean waters). We 
would like to identify devices/methods that can detect, count, and 
identify zooplankton and drift invertebrates in an economical way in 
rivers and estuary systems. There is potential for future collaboration 
with the Seeker in developing and testing winning solutions.
    This is a Theoretical Challenge that requires only a written 
proposal to be submitted. The Challenge award will be contingent upon 
theoretical evaluation of the proposal by the Bureau of Reclamation 
(Seeker). The Seeker has a total prize pool budget of $30,000 to pay 
the top three submission(s) that meet or exceed the criteria below, an 
award of $10,000 each. No awards are guaranteed unless they meet or 
exceed the criteria, and more than one award is not guaranteed. If only 
a single submission meets or exceeds the criteria, the prize award may 
be as high as $15,000.
    To receive an award, the Solvers will not have to transfer their 
exclusive intellectual property rights to the Seeker. Instead, they 
will grant to the Seeker a non-exclusive license to practice their 
solutions.
    The Seeker believes there might be a potential for future 
collaboration with awarded Solver(s), although such collaboration is 
not guaranteed. The Seeker may also encourage Solver(s) to

[[Page 60711]]

further develop and test their winning submissions through subsequent 
round(s) of competition. Solvers should mention if they have the 
ability for subsequent design and development phases and would be 
willing to consider future collaborations and/or subsequent 
competitions.
    Background: Habitat restoration is considered a key element of fish 
recovery, and the quality of habitat and food resources available to 
fish often needs to be evaluated before and after restoration actions. 
Habitats are often designed to provide increased foraging and rearing 
habitats at appropriate spatial and temporal scales. Abundance of key 
food resources for fish such as zooplankton and drift invertebrate (1 
mm to 20 mm in size) is time-intensive and expensive to measure, 
especially for juvenile salmon in a highly dynamic and complex system 
such as the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta (California).
    Traditional sampling methods involve the use of towed nets (for 
slow-moving water) or stationary nets (for fast-moving water) that 
collect organisms from the water column. Both the field collection of 
samples and the subsequent sorting and identification of collected 
invertebrates are time-intensive and expensive, and agencies lacking 
technical expertise must often rely on outside experts to process 
samples. Because of the high costs associated with these traditional 
methods, the spatial and temporal extent of sampling is often 
inadequate to characterize food availability at scales that are 
biologically relevant.
    In the marine science community, significant advances have been 
made in plankton monitoring through the use of devices that capture 
high-resolution images of particles (>100 [micro]m) and invertebrates. 
These devices produce a catalog of time-stamped images that can be 
processed to various taxonomic levels with image analysis software, 
allowing the abundance of organisms in a known volume of water to be 
quantified. Examples can be found in the following links: http://jaffeweb.ucsd.edu/node/317, http://www.artynet.fr/hydropticREDIRIDEM/uvp.html.
    Analogous technologies for freshwater environments do not exist, 
but could be developed to continuously monitor the prey abundances and 
dynamics in key locations for migrating and rearing fishes. Pilot 
systems have been tested in the freshwater environment, but there have 
been problems with image capture, leading to poor image quality 
(blurred) and poor identification (low probability of differentiating 
target organisms from drift algae, detritus and other materials). The 
difficulties during the pilot were likely caused by

 High water velocity
 Low water clarity (turbidity)
 Small target size (1-20 mm)

    Another big difference between the marine ocean environment and the 
freshwater and estuarine environment is that ocean monitoring tends to 
be vertical (in the water column) and items on the surface are not a 
large percentage of the whole so they can be ignored. In a stream, 
items on the surface are a high percentage of the overall water column, 
and sunlight at the surface affects the imaging equipment considerably. 
It is difficult to get accurate measurements if targeted items on the 
surface are ignored.
    The Challenge: A device/method is sought that could be deployed to 
collect data continuously (over hours, preferably days) to capture 
tidal and day/night variation in prey abundance in rivers and streams. 
By simultaneously deploying multiple units, scientists could measure 
important spatial and temporal variation such as depth stratification 
and source/sink food web dynamics.
    The device/method must detect, count, and identify drift 
invertebrates automatically in a size range of 1 to 20 mm in a cost-
effective method.
    Our goal is to identify ideas and help promote their testing and 
manufacture for use in the industry. There is potential for awarded 
Solvers who are interested to continue in the development of these 
ideas for a commercial product.
    Multiple government agencies would likely be interested in this 
solution (Bureau of Reclamation, U.S. Geological Survey, National 
Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration-National Marine Fisheries 
Service, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, State Fish and Wildlife 
agencies, and others).

Things To Avoid

    1. Equipment made today for oceanographic study--although a good 
place to start, we are familiar with what exists and our Challenge is 
to go beyond what exists for our particular problems in freshwater 
systems.
    2. A simple list of equipment without explanation of how they work 
in concert will not suffice as a description of the system.

Any Proposed Solution Should Address the Following Technical 
Requirements

Must Haves

    1. The device/method should be able to:
    a. Detect representative samples of drift invertebrates (1-20 mm). 
This should include those targeted items floating on the surface to a 
high degree as well as those in the water column. Representative 
samples of drift invertebrates in California and other localities are 
available at the California Department of Fish and Wildlife's Aquatic 
Bioassessment Laboratory digital reference collections (http://www.dfg.ca.gov/abl/Lab/referencecollection.asp).
    b. Count the targeted items in samples (sort out debris from 
targeted zooplankton and invertebrates to minimize false positives).
    c. Identify the number and taxonomic family (or groups of 
morphologically similar families) of specimens detected (Note: exact 
identification of each species is not as critical as identification of 
the total amount of food available to fish).
    2. Requirement no. 1 must be done under the following conditions:
    a. Velocities between 0 and 1.5 meters per second.
    b. Turbidity between 0 and 100 Nephelometric Turbidity Units.
    c. Function in shallow water (less than 1 m) and deep water (up to 
20m).
    d. Function over a long period of continuous deployment (greater 
than 24 hours but preferably many days).
    e. Operate without natural light (at night or dark spaces, provides 
own light source as needed).
    f. Operate under bright light conditions near the surface in the 
daytime.
    3. If the device is submersible in water, it should be durable 
enough to be deployable when towed off a boat.
    4. If optical, it should be able to capture images without a blur.
    5. The device/method must be able to accurately sample and image 
available drift invertebrates (food) with 95 percent accuracy.
    6. The device/method must measure the size of each target item 
within 0.5 mm or 10 percent of item size.
    7. The total cost of the equipment should be targeted to not exceed 
$100K when produced in larger quantities.
    8. The proposed system should offer the Seeker client ``freedom to 
practice.'' There should be no third-party patent art preventing the 
use of specific equipment and materials for their commercial 
application.

Nice to Have

    Include ability to measure flow entering device, such that number 
of food particles per volume of water is estimable.
    Project Deliverables: This is a Theoretical Challenge that requires 
only

[[Page 60712]]

a written proposal to be submitted. The Challenge award will be 
contingent upon theoretical evaluation of the proposal by the Seeker. 
The submitted proposal should include the following:
    1. Detailed description of a method/device that can detect, count, 
and identify drift invertebrates in fresh water rivers and streams. The 
Solver must describe with a high level of technical detail as to how 
the system would meet or not meet each of the ``must have'' and ``nice 
to have'' attributes in Technical Requirements described above. The 
Solver should expect that their submittal will be reviewed by experts 
in the field of biology and multiple fields of engineering.
    2. Rationale as to why the Solver believes that the proposed 
method/device will work. This rationale should address each of the 
Technical Requirements described in the Detailed Description and should 
be supported with relevant examples.
    3. The active principle applied for detection and quantification 
shall be described in detail. The detecting technology shall be 
described in detail. Potential technology suppliers shall be 
identified.
    4. Sufficient data to support claims, if available.
    5. List of equipment required with cost estimates.
    6. The Solver needs to describe how deployable and workable the 
system would be under a wide variety of environmental conditions 
including water depths, light, turbidity, salinity, velocities, and 
turbulence such as those found in small to large streams in the western 
United States.
    The proposal should not include any personal identifying 
information (name, username, company, address, phone, email, personal 
Web site, resume, etc.).
    The Challenge award will be contingent upon theoretical evaluation 
of the proposal by the Seeker against the Technical Requirements.
    Solutions that meet the requirements will also be judged on the 
following items in order of priority:
     Practical feasibility;
     Detection precision;
     Manufacturing cost;
     Required power source; and
     Extra weight/space;
     Time to market.
    Judging: After the Challenge deadline, the Seeker will evaluate the 
submissions and make a decision with regards to the winning 
solution(s). All Solvers that submitted a proposal will be notified on 
the status of their submissions. However, no detailed evaluation of 
individual submissions will be provided. Decisions by the Seeker cannot 
be contested.
    Submitted solutions will be evaluated by a Judging Panel composed 
of scientists, engineers, and other related technical experts. The 
Judging Panel will also have consultation access to technical experts 
outside of their expertise, as determined necessary, to evaluate 
specific submissions.
    Eligibility Rules: To be able to win a prize under this 
competition, an individual or entity must:
    1. Agree to the rules of the competition (15 U.S. Code 3719(g)(1));
    2. Be an entity that is incorporated in and maintains a primary 
place of business in the United States, or (b) in the case of an 
individual, a citizen or permanent resident of the United States (15 
U.S. Code 3719(g)(3));
    3. Not be a Federal entity or Federal employee acting within the 
scope of their employment; (15 U.S. Code 3719(g)(4));
    4. Assume risks and waive claims against the Federal Government and 
its related entities (15 U.S. Code 3719(i)(1)(B)); and,
    5. Not use Federal facilities, or consult with Federal employees 
during the competition unless the facilities and employees are made 
available to all individuals and entities participating in the 
competition on an equitable basis.
    The following individuals or entities are not eligible regardless 
of whether they meet the criteria set forth above:
    1. Any individual who employs an evaluator on the Judging Panel or 
otherwise has a material business relationship or affiliation with any 
Judge.
    2. Any individual who is a member of any Judge's immediate family 
or household.
    3. The Seeker, participating organizations, and any advertising 
agency, contractor or other individual or organization involved with 
the design, production, promotion, execution, or distribution of the 
prize competition; all employees, representatives and agents thereof; 
and all members of the immediate family or household of any such 
individual, employee, representative, or agent.
    4. Any individual or entity that uses Federal funds to develop the 
proposed solution now or any time in the past, unless such use is 
consistent with the grant award, or other applicable Federal funds 
awarding document. NOTE: Submissions that propose to improve or adapt 
existing federally funded technologies for the solution sought in this 
prize competition are eligible.
    Consultation: Fish recovery program managers and technical 
specialists from across the Bureau of Reclamation, U.S. Geological 
Survey, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, National Oceanic and 
Atmospheric Administration-National Marine Fisheries Service, and U.S. 
Army Corps of Engineers were consulted in identifying and selecting the 
topic of this prize competition. Direct and indirect input from various 
stakeholders and partners associated with the fish recovery program 
efforts by these agencies were also considered. In addition, the Bureau 
of Reclamation maintains an open invitation to the public to suggest 
prize competition topics at www.usbr.gov/research/challenges.
    Public Disclosure: InnoCentive, Inc. is administering this 
challenge under a challenge support services contract with the Bureau 
of Reclamation. Participation is conditioned on providing the data 
required on InnoCentive's online registration form. Personal data will 
be processed in accordance with InnoCentive's Privacy Policy which can 
be located at http://www.innocentive.com/privacy.php. Before including 
your address, phone number, email address, or other personal 
identifying information in your proposal, you should be aware that the 
Seeker is under no obligation to withhold such information from public 
disclosure, and it may be made publicly available at any time. Neither 
InnoCentive nor the Seeker is responsible for human error, theft, 
destruction, or damage to proposed solutions, or other factors beyond 
its reasonable control. Solver assumes any and all risks and waives any 
and all claims against the Seeker and its related entities, except in 
the case of willful misconduct, for any injury, death, damage, or loss 
of property, revenue, or profits, whether direct, indirect, or 
consequential, arising from participation in this competition, whether 
the injury, death, damage, or loss arises through negligence or 
otherwise.

    Dated: September 30, 2015.
David Raff,
Science Advisor.
[FR Doc. 2015-25319 Filed 10-6-15; 8:45 am]
 BILLING CODE 4332-90- P