Undergraduate Education: A year of undergraduate education is 30 semester hours, 45 quarter hours or the equivalent of college study. This education must have been obtained in an accredited college or university for which high school graduation or the equivalent was a prerequisite.

Graduate Education: In the absence of specific graduate program information, a year of graduate education is 18 semester hours or 27 quarter hours of graduate level college course work, or the number of credit hours the school attended has determined to represent 1 year of full-time study. This education must have been obtained in an accredited college or university.

Experience: One year of work experience is twelve months working full-time (at least 35-40 hours per week). Part-time experience can be pro-rated (i.e., a year at 20 hours per week is credited as 6 months of experience). If your position consisted of mixed duties, experience credit is given for the percentage of time that you spent on qualifying duties (i.e., if you held a position for 2 years, full-time, consisting of 25% personnel work and 75% budget work, and then applied for a budget position you could calculate your experience as follows: 2 yrs = 24 months. 24 months x 75% [percentage of time spent on budget duties] = 18 months of qualifying experience.)

BASIC EDUCATION REQUIREMENT FOR ECOLOGIST, GS-0408:

Applicants must meet the Basic Education Requirement below:

Successful completion of a full 4-year course of study in an accredited college or university leading to a bachelor's or higher degree in biology or a related field of science underlying ecological research that included at least 30 semester hours or the equivalent in basic and applied biological sciences. These hours must have included at least 9 semester hours or the equivalent in ecology, and 12 semester hours or the equivalent in physical and mathematical sciences.

For GS-13:

In addition to the basic education requirement as stated above, applicants must possess at least one year of appropriate professional experience, that is equivalent to at least the GS-12 level in the Federal service, and has equipped them with the knowledge, skills, and abilities to successfully perform the duties of this position. Examples of specialized experience may include:

• Working within a multi-disciplinary, collaborative setting with other research scientists to address landscape-scale questions dealing with bird populations, bird habitats, and land use and climate change;
• Conducting avian ecology research addressing management questions to investigate broad-scale changes to avian populations. This experience includes developing research ideas, securing research funds, setting up field experiments, hiring and training technicians, collecting field data on wild birds, and using advanced statistical modeling approaches to analyze and publish research results;
• Working with a variety of stakeholders including local, State, and Federal wildlife personnel to address applied scientific research questions of avian management priority; and
• Using scientific information to develop decision support tools for planning and implementation of avian management, conservation, and/or restoration activities.