The San Diego Society Of Natural History

The San Diego Society of Natural History, doing business as the San Diego Natural History Museum, is a San Diego-based 501(c)(3) non-profit that performs federal environmental research, species monitoring, and biological surveying as a prime recipient of federal grants and as a definitive-contract awardee, with 97% of its federal footprint as prime awards. The organization operates across 25 distinct federal agencies with a grant-heavy profile centered on natural resources management, conservation research, and species recovery on Department of Defense installations.

The museum's concrete capability portfolio spans wildlife surveys, botanical studies, species monitoring and management, specimen collection curation, and applied environmental research using emerging technology platforms. Representative work includes a $720,840 definitive contract awarded in February 2026 by the Humphreys Engineer Center Support Activity (Army Corps of Engineers) under the Environmental Security Technology Certification Program for a four-year plant-pollinator ecology demonstration using eDNA metabarcoding, custom camera traps, and AI classification models through February 2030; a $284,035 cooperative agreement from the Navy's Office of Naval Research awarded in September 2024 for multi-species studies and surveys on Marine Corps Air Station Miramar under the Basic and Applied Scientific Research program (CFDA 12.300); and a $495,403 Project Grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services awarded in September 2024 for revitalization of the museum's marine invertebrates collection, including digitization and climate-controlled storage of crustaceans, annelids, and soft-bodied mollusks.

The Marine Corps dominates the customer concentration by award count, with 9 awards and $157 thousand in combined potential value across marine corps installations at Miramar, Camp Pendleton, Twentynine Palms, and Bridgeport. The National Science Foundation, National Commission on Libraries and Information Science, and the Navy's Naval Facilities Engineering Command each account for 6 awards; the Department of the Interior Fish and Wildlife Service carries 5. The source identifies four awards with ultimate completion dates in the next twenty-four months, representing near-term recompete exposure. Grant work predominates across the federal footprint, with cooperative agreements and project grants from the Marine Corps, Navy, Department of the Interior Fish and Wildlife Service, National Science Foundation (Biological Sciences program, CFDA 47.074), and the Institute of Museum and Library Services (Museums for America, CFDA 45.301) supporting species recovery for federally threatened California red-legged frogs, avian monitoring, golden eagle management, bat biodiversity assessment, and specimen collection digitization. The museum acts as a sub-recipient on two recent coastal dune restoration grants funded through the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation as prime grantee. Recent award velocity shows one award in 2026, two in 2025, and six in 2024, after a sustained decline from 2021–2023.