Desert Fish Habitat Partnership Update.

Authors: Jon Sjoberg

Year: 2025

Abstract

Since its development beginning in 2005, the Desert Fish Habitat Partnership (DFHP) has worked closely with the Desert Fishes Council as a key partner in our efforts to provide resources for desert fish habitat restoration and in education and outreach on desert fish species and arid land aquatic habitats. DFHP was recognized as a Fish Habitat Partnership by the National Fish Habitat Partnership Board in 2009 which has allowed us to annually access NFHP project funding to support on-ground habitat restoration, regional conservation assessments and outreach efforts for desert fishes. DFHP is one of only three regional FHPs focused primarily on non-game native fish species. Sponsored by the US Fish and Wildlife Service through 2023, in 2024 we became an Initiative of the Western Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies. DFHP’s geographic scope encompasses the entirety of the Great Basin and Mohave deserts, and those portions of the Sonoran and Chihuahuan deserts that lie within the United States. This includes all or portions of 11 western states and approximately 705,000 square miles. Since 2009, DFHP has directed $2.2 million in federal fish habitat funds, leveraged with over $11 million federal and non-federal matching dollars, to complete 57 fish habitat projects with 90+ partners in 10 of the 11 states within DFHP’s geographical boundary. DFHP’s project focus is on addressing critical species and aquatic habitat conservation needs for 179 priority desert fish species and finding opportunities to implement actions at basin and aquatic system scales in cooperation with other partners to address landscape scale aquatic conservation needs. We anticipate that federal fish habitat project funding will continue to be available with the next DFHP funding opportunity in late 2026 for Federal FY27 project funding. DFHP, in partnership with the Western Native Trout Initiative, has recently completed seven river-basin based Multispecies Aquatic Assessments encompassing the entirety of our geographic range; these assessments integrate information on known and modeled native fish distributions, riverine connectivity, and landscape condition and threats. The associated web-based mapping tool provides a public portal to identify conservation values for watersheds scaled from 0 (low value) to 1 (high value) and for evaluating the landscape context and conservation priority of proposed projects.