Habitat Protection and Restoration- Fish Passage and Other Dam Management

Background

The Habitat grant program provides funding to preserve essential habitat; protect, restore, and stabilize important fish habitats; and increase habitat availability. The GLFT pursues these efforts through investments in specific places with a degraded or vulnerable habitat, connectivity enhancements, and use of decision-support tools that suggest optimal strategies for investing in habitat. The RFP is planned for release annually in the winter.

The GLFT prioritizes its investments in capital projects such as fish passage, dam removal, and land acquisition to projects where the habitat opportunity is prime, other funders are contributing, long-term management is assured, and the proposed project has the strongest community support and interest.

Funding Priorities

The Trust’s priorities for the Habitat Protection and Restoration grant category are:

• Projects that offer an increase in long-term, sustainable, natural reproduction for species now supported by hatchery production—project benefits should be targeted toward salmonids and nonsalmonid predator game species.
• Projects that offer secondary benefits—for example, improved sea lamprey management or protection of state-listed threatened or endangered species—may be supported at a greater funding level.
• Applicants that use the Great Lakes Aquatic Habitat Framework (GLAHF), the Great Lakes Fishery Commission Barrier Removal Collaboration Suite, Fishwerks, existing field inventories, or similar tools to identify appropriate projects or as part of their proposed scopes of work.

Eligibility

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• Organizations eligible to apply for GLFT grants include nonprofit organizations, educational, and governmental (including tribal) organizations.
• Initial project eligibility requirements include:
  • The primary purpose of the project must be to protect or restore habitat for Great Lakes fish.
  • Projects must be located in the Lake Michigan basin or within the state of Michigan.
  • Projects in the Lake Michigan basin but outside of the state of Michigan (e.g., Indiana, Illinois, or Wisconsin) must be regionally significant for funding consideration.