THE FOUNDATION

Mission and Strategy
Marine Ventures Foundation seeks to improve and protect critical marine, coastal and river habitats in North America, South America and the Caribbean. Founded in 2000, MVF uses ecosystem-based approaches to ensure habitat biodiversity and long-standing cultural heritage through cutting edge conservation science, strong partnerships and market incentives. The Foundation funds projects where outomes meet three minimum criteria: a critical habitat to protect or restore, multidisciplinary team approaches and strong community involvement. A fourth criteria is that a funded project leverage the Foundation’s conservation portfolio. Successful outcomes of funded projects include ecosystem biological improvement, improved community/ecosystem governance and education/outreach programs.

Current Conservation Portfolio
Marine Ventures funds protection and restoration projects to counter the spread of invasive species, measure the impact of water diversion programs, baseline the bioregion and measure the human impact on these ecosystems. The foundation is currently working in four geographic regions: Snake River System in Idaho, Colorado River Delta in Mexico, Chesapeake Bay and Coastal Rivers of California. We also have projects underway in Argentina on the Rio Parana and in the Berry Islands, Bahamas. We maintain an active involvement in each of our funded projects. We are open to exploring new projects that meet our funding criteria. The best way to gage our interest is via a short one page email describing the project, status, objectives and funding requirements. Our typical grants range from $5,000 to $25,000.

How We Work
MVF takes the long view, staying the course on conservation projects that have measurable outomes. The achievement of durable change requires a long term commitment, strong partnerships and taking calculated risks. We are open to new ideas for significant change where the project focus is on root causes not symptoms. Some of our best work is when we operate in collaborative, multidicipline partnerships. The problems are better understood from both an ecosystem and human perspective, the solutions are broad encompassing all major issues and the creation of a results-oriented team approach leads to better outcomes.

Our Tools - cutting edge conservation science
Essential to protecting an ecosystem is the creation of a baseline map that measures the biodiversity and the habitat. With baseline models, conservation teams can assess current habitat health, devise and implement restoration plans and monitor their effectiveness over time. MVF has pioneered the development of high spatial and temporal resolution imagery utilizing manned and unmanned aerial platforms to obtain orthogonal, geo-referenced basemaps. With these ecological accurate basemaps, both protection or restoration programs can be designed, approved and completed.

Our Commitment
We at MVF are driven and dedicated to protecting biodiversity and their habitats through innovative biodiversity projects, being solid collaborative partners in conservation and always leading the way toward new and innovative solutions to protect the most important ecosystems. We welcome new collaborations with commited partners. Join us.

CONTACT US
email: info @ MarineVentures.org

Snail Mail:
Marine Ventures Foundation
PO Box 14390
Jackson Hole, WY 83002