Arizona Aquatic Resources Program

The Bureau of Land Management’s (BLM) Arizona Aquatic Resources Program protects and restores riparian and wetland areas, aquatic habitats, and water resources to provide functioning ecosystems for a combination of balanced and diverse uses including fish and wildlife, and for the long-term needs of future generations. Policy guidance for the Program ensures that public land management based on multiple use and sustained yield provides healthy and productive riparian, wetland, and aquatic habitat, achieves land health standards, and considers society’s long-term needs for healthy watersheds. The issues the Program addresses are diverse and include restoration, habitat fragmentation and degradation, drought resiliency, water availability, and aquatic invasive species. Program staff provide professional expertise and policy guidance to BLM managers, Federal, State, Tribal, and local governments, and non-governmental partners on these issues, and implement the best management practices to minimize or avoid impacts to water resources, riparian and wetland areas, and aquatic habitats on public lands. This program supports projects funded through the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, Section 40804 (b) Ecosystem Restoration. This program also supports projects funded through the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), Sections 50221 Resilience, 50222 Ecosystems Restoration and 50303 DOI.

Funding Opportunity Goals :
1. Ensuring water availability to sustain healthy riparian and wetland areas and aquatic habitats.
2. Restoring degraded water resources, riparian and wetland areas, and aquatic habitats, with a focus on process-based approaches and promoting riverscape health.
3. Advancing decision support models, and the inventory, assessment, and monitoring information that feeds such models, to inform the protection of remaining high quality habitats and the strategic restoration of degraded systems.