Letter from the Coordinator
The past year has been another banner year for coastal marsh and flagship species conservation. Funding resources offered through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the Inflation Reduction Act continued to support significant coastal marsh restoration and coastal resiliency work – benefits that extend well beyond birds to fish, communities and carbon sequestration. Coastal restoration work is urgent and it takes time for restoration projects to achieve high quality habitat conditions. This is why the ACJV focuses nearly all of our work on catalyzing on-the-ground implementation. The planning work we undertook last year focused on products that will directly inform implementation. This includes state guidance documents and web tools for Saltmarsh Sparrows (complete) and Black Rails (in progress) that identify specific projects and management actions to explore in every priority marsh in each state. These documents have helped us generate a list of more than 200 projects in need of funding that we actively use to match projects with grant opportunities.
We assist partners in applying for funds by providing coordination services, ghost writing, and leadership engagement that help partners submit more priority proposals. This year alone, these efforts helped partners to secure more than $7.7M and apply for an additional $8M of pending funding for high priority salt marsh conservation projects. This funding is in addition to the $39 million in federal grants awarded to ACJV partners this last year (and matched by~$75M in partner funding) through the NAWCA and National Coastal Wetland grant programs (another banner year!) and the more than $55M of successful proposals submitted independently by our partners for salt marsh restoration projects across the Atlantic coast. Collectively these funds are supporting work to protect, restore, and enhance over 95,000 acres of habitat across the Atlantic Coast!
In the coming year we are excited to continue this important work to support our partners. Some upcoming projects include extending priority marsh mapping to the South Atlantic to capture important wintering habitat for tidal marsh sparrows and Black Ducks as well as year round habitat for Black Rails. We will also release the first Florida state management guidance document for Black Rail and begin similar plans for other South Atlantic states, among many other projects. A huge thank you to the hundreds of partners – and growing – who work tirelessly every day to restore our coastal marsh habitats! Our hats go off to you!