Healthy rivers define healthy communities, and rivers are healthiest when all their inhabitants can move upstream and downstream unencumbered.  When that natural ebb and flow is lost, communities suffer.  We focus our work on dam removal, fish passage construction and remediation at barriers.  This helps reestablish natural cycles in rivers, allowing fish, mussels, amphibians, turtles, and a host of aquatic invertebrates, access to critical habitat.

We work to restore rivers: for people, for fish, and for everything else that depends on healthy rivers. 

Fish have been deeply impacted by centuries of dam building--particularly anadromous species like American shad, sea lamprey, blueback herring, alewives and Atlantic salmon, that return from the ocean to spawn in rivers. There are over 1,000 small dams creating barriers on watershed tributaries, and over a dozen dams spanning the main stem of the Connecticut.  For migratory fish, meeting up with a barrier is like heading home and finding all the roads closed at your destination. It can stop spawning cold.

• Once-teeming migratory fish populations have plummeted since initial regulatory successes in passage and population recovery from the 1970’s - 1990’s.

• We’re working to turn this around. Since 1997 we’ve partnered with dam owners and allies to restore over 44 miles of vital habitat in four states. That’s more than the distance from Hartford, CT to Old Saybrook; or Springfield, MA to our Greenfield headquarters; or the distance from Hanover, NH to Bellows Falls, VT.

StanChem Dam Fishway in Berlin, CT;

Springborn Dam in Enfield, CT;

Green River Ecosystem Restoration Project in Greenfield, MA;

Homestead Woolen Mill Dam in Swanzey, NH.