Sky Island Alliance

Sky Island Alliance, a Tucson-based nonprofit organization, serves as a prime recipient of federal cooperative agreements and project grants for wildlife monitoring, habitat restoration, and binational conservation research along the U.S.-Mexico border, with no federal contract work in its footprint. The organization operates exclusively as a grant recipient—100% of its 40 recent awards are prime federal grants, not subrecipient awards—and specializes in cross-border ecosystem management, riparian restoration, and migratory wildlife protection.

Sky Island Alliance's customer base concentrates heavily within the Department of the Interior, which accounts for 88% of recent awards across nine distinct federal agencies. The National Park Service Intermountain Region anchors the relationship with 15 awards, the National Park Service National Office carries 7 awards, and the Fish and Wildlife Service (both headquarters Region 9 and Region 2) collectively carries 10 awards. The Bureau of Reclamation accounts for 3 awards. All funding flows through cooperative agreements and project grants under Interior-administered programs, primarily the Southwest Border Resource Protection Program (CFDA 15.963) and the Neotropical Migratory Bird Conservation Act (CFDA 15.635).

Representative grant work includes a $115,715 cooperative agreement from the NPS Intermountain Region under Southwest Border Resource Protection to conduct 12 months of wildlife monitoring across 100 miles of the U.S.-Mexico border (April 2026–December 2027), a $109,101 cooperative agreement from the same region to monitor wildlife occurrence and movement patterns in response to border infrastructure across 90 miles (June 2025–December 2026), a $278,369 project grant from the Fish and Wildlife Service for grassland bird conservation in Sonora, Mexico (May 2024–May 2026), and a multi-year cooperative agreement with NPS to restore springs and conduct binational spring-management workshops with Mexican partners including CONANP and Universidad de la Sierra (July 2022–December 2026). Additional work encompasses invasive species removal and riparian restoration on Bureau of Land Management lands in southern Arizona and cooperative conservation projects partnering Saguaro National Park with Mexican protected areas.

Activity has remained modest and flat—ranging from one to four awards annually over the past five years—with combined obligated dollars across all 40 awards totaling $3 million. Five awards (as of July 2026) face ultimate completion within the next twenty-four months, exposing the organization to recompete activity. Sky Island Alliance's federal footprint is entirely grant-based, geographically anchored to the southwestern borderlands (Tucson headquarters with performance extending into Arizona, New Mexico, and Sonora, Mexico), and focused on data-driven wildlife and habitat research underpinning binational conservation policy and on-the-ground stewardship.