NIWR Member Funding & Governance, 2019

With support from the National Institutes for Water Resources (NIWR) Board of Directors, the State of Washington Water Research Center developed and delivered a survey of NIWR members over the winter of 2020-2021. The objective of the survey was to collect and report information about funding, expenditures, staffing, administrative home, and other characteristics of NIWR members for the year 2019. A pilot survey was completed by several NIWR Board of Directors member institutes in the Spring of 2020. The survey request was sent out to all institutes in the fall of 2020, and followed up with another opportunity to complete or correct survey entries after the 2021 NIWR Annual meeting in February.

Summaries of institute administrative homes, personnel, funding sources and uses, and activities are provided primarily in graphical form with brief commentary. A link to the survey and an comma delimited (CSV) file are provided in the appendix at the end. The survey and dataset has additional content that is not covered in this summary that may be of interest to NIWR member institutions.

This report is the second of a two-part project. The first part, completed in January 2020 (Pickering, Padowski, Yoder 2020) is a summary of information and data from previous surveys available prior to the survey implemented in 2020 (for fiscal year 2019) summarized here. The Phase 1 report is available at the bottom of this Story Map.

The Water Resources Research Institutes Program received an increase in funding that provides an increase in funding for most member institutes from just over $92,000 to $125,000 per year starting in 2020. Institutes report a variety of plans and uses for this additional funding, including the following:

• Research and outreach (Information transfer) were dominant.
• Outreach investments in website development, web data portals, production of a documentary or related outreach products. 
• Additional student support, or to support travel. 
• Administration and/or additional staffing.
• Support for conferences and/or seminar series.

This appendix provides a link to the survey and the data collected from it. The survey and dataset has additional content that is not covered in the above summary that may be of interest to NIWR member institutions.