“We’ve been thinking about this and working on it for years,” Amanda Clements, board chair of the Uncompahgre Watershed Partnership, said of a project two regional nonprofits — the UWP and the Mountain Studies Institute — are embarking upon. The project recently received funding as part of a wider effort involving more than a dozen conservation initiatives. The initiatives were bundled by the Southwestern Water Conservation and Infrastructure Project, which applied to, and received, a total of $25.6 million from the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation’s Upper Colorado River Basin Environmental Drought Mitigation Program with funding from the Inflation Reduction Act. The UWP and MSI’s shared goal is to help restore several fens in the Ironton area, above Silverton, that have become degraded; their share of the Bureau of Reclamation award was $931,000.