The Ecoshare.info website had been maintained by the United States Department of Agriculture Forest Service (USDA FS) as a platform for distributing ecology-related information for almost 25 years. It receives thousands of visits a year from ecologists from state, federal, and academic institutions. It warehouses key ecological material that reflects hundreds of thousands of USDA FS dollars in data collection and analysis. It had been managed as a .info website under contract with Tetra Tech (contract # AG-046W-D-09-0125).
During 2020-2022 the Ecoshare.info website was converted to a .gov environment by personnel of and per direction from the Chief Information Office (CIO). This process included extensive review of options for the site going forward. Both CIO and Data Resource Management (DRM) indicated they did not have the capacity to service the website once it was transferred to .gov and recommended we hire a contractor.
The work under this contract, for year 1, is expected to involve transferring pages/files from the .info website to the .gov website. A guidance document has been created. We estimate the workload is about 200 hours. In the years 2-5, if funding becomes available, the contract will involve maintenance and occasional uploading of new material, with the workload averaging 10 hours/month.
