Open & closing dates: 06/16/2021 to 07/01/2021
Appointment type: Permanent
Salary: $53,433 to $69,462 per year
Work schedule:Full-time

See full job details and application instructions at https://www.usajobs.gov/GetJob/ViewDetails/604745300

Duties

Summary

This position is located in Mi-Wuk Village, CA on the Stanislaus National Forest.

This position is located on a Forest service unit. Duties are to provide professional, scientific assistance to the unit staff in dealing with invasive noxious weeds, sensitive plant species and botany and rangeland management.

For additional information about the duties of this position, please contact Andrew Welsh at 209-916-5956 or andrew.welsh@usda.gov.

Responsibilities

  • Serves as a botanist with staff responsibilities for developing, evaluating, and monitoring threatened, endangered and sensitive plant species and plant community and vegetation management programs.
  • Participates on interdisciplinary teams to provide the documentation and coordination necessary for the effective management of threatened, endangered and sensitive plant species.
  • Develops and/or modifies established procedures for recording plant survey information in order to meet environmental assessment requirements, botanical baseline data requirements, and for maintaining plants.
  • Conducts and oversees vegetation inventories, population, and community monitoring in compliance with selected protocols to contribute to the project’s baseline data for botanical resources.
  • Maintains plant surveys and monitoring records in appropriate data base files, in addition to collection and preparation of voucher specimens for plants.
  • Responsible for the analysis and interpretation of population trend and community composition monitoring data and the preparation of summary reports.
  • Assists in the development and implementation of management plans for the protection and enhancement of habitat for special status plants, and the control of noxious weeds or other invasive species.
  • Performs assignments which may include collaborating with other resources specialists in the preparation of prescribed fire, pesticide use and NEPA compliance documents for a variety of vegetation management and restoration actions.
  • Assists the Rangeland Management Specialists and other resource specialists in range permit administration on assigned allotments, or portions of allotments.
  • The position is responsible for completing assigned livestock utilization and compliance monitoring, allotment monitoring and data collection and assigned reports.
  • Participates by monitoring, gathering, analyzing, interpreting and evaluating data to determine if land management, economic, and social goals and objectives identified for the land involved are being achieved.
  • Conducts short and long term monitoring of plant community change, trends, grazing impacts; precipitation; soil erosion hazards; and correlates other rangeland resource activities and uses.
  • Prepares botanical reports, biological evaluations, and assessments to provide input for various environmental documents.

Travel Required

Occasional travel – Occasional travel for meetings and/or training. Also, project related work.

Requirements

Conditions of Employment

  • Must be a U.S. Citizen or National.
  • Males born after 12/31/1959 must be Selective Service registered or exempt.
  • Subject to satisfactory adjudication of background investigation and/or fingerprint check.
  • Successful completion of one year probationary period, unless previously served.
  • Per Public Law 104-134 all Federal employees are required to have federal payments made by direct deposit to their financial institution.
  • Successfully pass the E-Verify employment verification check. To learn more about E-Verify, including your rights and responsibilities, visit e-verify.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.

Your application and resume must clearly show that you possess the experience requirements. Transcripts must be provided for qualifications based on education. Provide course descriptions as necessary.

This is an interdisciplinary position and may be filled in any of the job series listed below.

GS-0430
GS-0454

Basic Requirement:
Botanist GS-0430
Degree: botany; or basic plant science that included at least 24 semester hours in botany
OR
Combination of education and experience: courses equivalent to a major in botany or basic plant science that included at least 24 semester hours in botany, as shown above, plus appropriate experience or additional education.
Evaluation of Education: Courses in basic botany, plant anatomy or morphology, cytology, histology, genetics, taxonomy or systematics, algology, mycology, ethnobotany, and those dealing with specific problems of a botanical nature or with specific groups of plants are qualifying.

Rangeland Management Specialist GS-0454:
Degree: range management; or a related discipline that included at least 42 semester hours in a combination of the plant, animal, and soil sciences, and natural resources management, as follows:

-Range Management — At least 18 semester hours of course work in range management, including courses in such areas as basic principles of range management, range plants, range ecology, range inventories and studies, range improvements, and ranch or rangeland planning.

-Directly Related Plant, Animal, and Soil Sciences — At least 15 semester hours of directly related courses in the plant, animal, and soil sciences, including at least one course in each of these three scientific areas, i.e., plant, animal, and soil sciences. Courses in such areas as plant taxonomy, plant physiology, plant ecology, animal nutrition, livestock production, and soil morphology or soil classification are acceptable.

-Related Resource Management Studies — At least 9 semester hours of course work in related resource management subjects, including courses in such areas as wildlife management, watershed management, natural resource or agricultural economics, forestry, agronomy, forages, and outdoor recreation management.

OR

Combination of education and experience: at least 42 semester hours of course work in the combination of plant, animal, and soil sciences and natural resources management shown above, 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:
Applicants must have one year of specialized experience equivalent to at least the GS-7 grade level; OR a master’s or equivalent graduate degree or 2 full years of progressively higher level graduate education leading to such a degree, if related; OR an appropriate combination of specialized experience and education (only graduate education in excess of 18 semester hours may be used to qualify applicants for this grade level). The education must have been obtained in an accredited college or university and demonstrate the knowledge, skills, and abilities necessary to do the work. Examples of specialized experience include: As an advanced trainee, participated in the evaluation and monitoring of the threatened, endangered and sensitive plant species, and plant community and vegetation management programs; Located, surveyed, identified, and recorded threatened, endangered and sensitive plant species information in order to meet environmental assessment requirements; Collected and summarized data and administered plant species projects; Assisted in performing recurring, well-defined, and moderately difficult range improvement projects such as preparing allotment management plans and determining stocking and rotation schemes; Assisted in preparing segments of conventional range use plans under multiple-use sustained yield concepts or developed simple activity plans.

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.

TIME IN GRADE REQUIREMENT: If you are a current federal employee in the General Schedule (GS) pay plan and applying for a promotion opportunity, you must meet time-in-grade (TIG) requirements of 52 weeks of service at the next lower grade level in the normal line of progression for the position being filled. This requirement must be met by the closing date of this announcement.

How to Apply

Please view Tips for Applicants – a guide to the Forest Service application process.

Please read the entire announcement and all instructions before you begin. You must complete this application process and submit all required documents electronically by 11:59p.m. Eastern Time (ET) on the closing date of this announcement.

Applying online is highly encouraged. We are available to assist you during business hours (normally 8:00a.m. – 4:00p.m., Monday – Friday). If applying online poses a hardship, contact the Agency Contact listed below well before the closing date for an alternate method. All hardship application packages must be complete and submitted no later than noon ET on the closing date of the announcement to be entered into the system prior to its closing.

This agency provides reasonable accommodation to applicants with disabilities on a case-by-case basis; contact the Agency Contact to request this.

To begin, in USAJOBS click “Apply” and follow the instructions to attach your resume and required documents, complete the assessment questionnaire, and submit your application.

NOTE: If a document is resubmitted, it replaces the previous submission, which means the previous document is no longer available to the Human Resources Office. If you are adding to, rather than replacing a previous submission, you must upload both the old document and the new document. You must verify that uploaded documents from USAJOBs transfer into the Agency’s staffing system as there is a limitation to the number of documents that can be transferred. However, once in the Agency’s staffing system, you will have the opportunity to upload additional documents. Applicants may combine all like required documents (e.g. SF-50s or veteran docs) into one or more files and scan for uploading into the application. Each file must not exceed 3MB. Grouping like documents into files will simplify the application process. Documents must be in one of the following formats: GIF, JPEG, JPG, PDF, PNG, RTF, or Word (DOC or DOCX). Uploaded documents may not require a password, digital signature, or other encryption to open.