Biological Scientist/Physical Scientist

This position supports the USDA Forest Service, Research and Development and will be located in Fort Collins, CO, Columbia, MO or Madison WI.
This employee analyzes, catalogs, and/or archives environmental databases; works with professional staff to improve annotation of databases with descriptive metadata and to provide data to online depositories.
For additional information about the duties of this position, please contact at James Lootens-White at James.Lootens-white@usda.gov.Qualifications: In order to qualify, you must meet the eligibility and qualifications requirements as defined below by the closing date of the announcement. For more information on the qualifications for this position, visit the Office of Personnel Management's General Schedule Qualification Standards.
Work Experience: Your resume must clearly document the following for each block of work experience; the beginning day, month and year the work assignment started and ended; the hours worked per week; position title, and series and grade if applicable; and description of duties performed. This information must be provided for each permanent, temporary or seasonal appointment/work assignment or volunteer work and should be clearly documented as a separate block of time. Incomplete, inaccurate or conflicting work history may not be credited for qualifications purposes. This can result in an applicant not being considered for the position.
Your application and resume must clearly show that you possess the experience requirements. Transcripts must be provided for qualifications based on education. Provide university course descriptions as necessary.
Basic Requirements for 0401: https://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/classification-qualifications/general-schedule-qualification-standards/0400/general-natural-resources-management-and-biological-sciences-series-0401/
A. Degree: biological sciences, agriculture, natural resource management, chemistry, or related disciplines appropriate to the position.
OR
B. Combination of education and experience: Courses equivalent to a major, as shown in A above, plus appropriate experience or additional education.
Basic Requirements for 1301:https://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/classification-qualifications/general-schedule-qualification-standards/1300/general-physical-science-series-1301/
A. Degree: physical science, engineering, or mathematics that included 24 semester hours in physical science and/or related engineering science such as mechanics, dynamics, properties of materials, and electronics.
OR
B. Combination of education and experience -- education equivalent to one of the majors shown in A above that included at least 24 semester hours in physical science and/or related engineering science, plus appropriate experience or additional education.
In addition to meeting the basic requirement, you must also possess experience and/or directly related education in the amounts listed below.
Specialized Experience Requirement:
For the GS-11: At least one year of specialized experience equivalent to the GS-9 grade level in federal service. To qualify at this level, your experience must include the following:

• Using techniques from statistical analysis, mathematics, image processing and analysis, forest inventory, geographic information systems (GIS), geospatial analysis, database operations, and computer science to conduct quality assurance tests on collection, compilation, storage, analysis, reporting, and distribution of strategic multi-resource data.
• Transferring natural resource data and reconciling inconsistencies, creating metadata records to document changes, and storing backup versions of original data files following data governance processes and protocols.
• Collaborating and consulting on research and monitoring projects to provide advice and respond to frequent user requests, satisfy the requirements of data users and research scientists, and assist researchers in extracting and interpreting spatial and tabular data.

OR
3 years of progressively higher-level graduate education leading to a Ph.D. degree or Ph.D., or equivalent doctoral degree directly related to the position in fields such as landscape ecology, forest dynamics, disturbance ecology, climate change research, population or community ecology, ecohydrology, or socioecological resilience modeling.
OR
A combination of graduate level education leading to a Ph.D. as described above, beyond the first two years of progressive graduate study (over 36 semester hours), and specialized experience described above that together meet the qualification requirements for this position.
For the GS-12: At least one year of specialized experience equivalent to the GS-11 grade level in federal service. To qualify at this level, your resume must reflect 52 weeks of ALL of the following duties:

• Applying and integrating techniques from statistical analysis, image processing and analysis, forest inventory, geographic information systems (GIS), geospatial analysis, database operations, and computer science to improve techniques or provide solutions for collection, compilation, storage, analysis, reporting, and distribution of strategic multi-resource data.
• Organizing data collected by researchers and/or from sensor networks, which includes accurately transferring data and reconciling inconsistencies, creating metadata records to document changes, and storing backup versions of original data files following data governance processes and protocols.
• Working with a variety of scientific research teams and clients to identify problems related to climatic, atmospheric, hydrologic, forest mensuration, and/or geospatial data and conduct analyses of systems to determine nature of requirements and logical work and information flows.

Experience refers to paid and unpaid experience, including volunteer work done through National Service programs (e.g., Peace Corps, AmeriCorps) and other organizations (e.g., professional; philanthropic; religious; spiritual; community, student, social). Volunteer work helps build critical competencies, knowledge, and skills and can provide valuable training and experience that translates directly to paid employment. You will receive credit for all qualifying experience, including volunteer experience.Education: See above for required and qualifying education. Graduate education alone is not qualifying for the GS-12 grade level. You must have the experience listed above to qualify.Employment Type: FULL_TIME