The Trinity River basin has been degraded by human activities for almost two hundred years, leading to a decline in available salmonid habitat and populations. The Trinity River Restoration Program (TRRP) was created in 2000 to restore salmon and steelhead populations. The project also aims to restore the river through flow management, streambank restoration, and riverbed improvement. 

After years of hard work by American Rivers and its project partners, the Bloede Dam in Maryland’s Patapsco River was successfully removed in 2018, restoring 52.5 miles of the river’s natural flow and more than 65 miles of native fish spawning habitat. Removing the dam also strengthened community resilience, improved public safety, and facilitated increased sediment transport to marshes and beaches along the Chesapeake Bay.

Bird Track Springs is a 2-mile reach of the Upper Grande Ronde River in eastern Oregon that has been degraded and altered by human activity. The once multi-threaded, well-connected river and floodplain became a single-threaded river with little connectivity and degraded habitat. This project aims to reconnect the river to its floodplain, increase habitat complexity, and restore salmonid populations. 

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE)–Detroit District and several other partners used Great Lakes Restoration Initiative funding to reconnect 340 kilometers of the Boardman River to Grand Traverse Bay of Lake Michigan. This project involved three dam removals over six years, and improved riverine habitat for important species. 

The Clackamas River is a tributary to the Columbia River that has been degraded by beaver removal, logging, mining, overgrazing, and urban development. This disconnected the floodplain from its river and negatively impacted fish populations. This project restored habitat to help threatened and endangered salmonids. 

With a growing push to remove low-head dams due to safety concerns and the potential for ecosystem improvement, Corydon, Indiana was approached by The Nature Conservancy to remove two dams owned by the Town. The dams blocked potential habitat for the endangered hellbender salamander.

In 1992, Congress passed the Elwha River Ecosystem and Fisheries Restoration Act, authorizing the removal of dams to restore the Elwha River's altered ecosystem. The Elwha Dam and Glines Canyon Dam were removed in 2011, allowing water to flow freely from the Olympic Mountains to the Strait of Juan de Fuca.

The Fort Sheridan Restoration Project restored 84 hectares of ravines, riparian woodlands, coastal bluff, beach, dunes, and lacustrine habitat along the coast of Lake Michigan. This project aimed to connect coastal habitats, restore native plant communities, and increase resilience along the coast. 

A partnership between the BLM, Sacramento Water Forum, and USFWS is working to restore spawning conditions and salmonid habitats in the Lower American River downstream of the Folsom Dam. The plan focuses on enhancing gravel habitat, adding woody material, and creating side channels and floodplains for spawning and rearing Chinook salmon and steelhead.

Led by USACE, the Bosque Wildfire Project was initiated to restore bosque habitat and wetland function around Albuquerque, New Mexico. Key features of restoration included constructing wetlands and swales to support moisture-seeking plants and animals, creating high-flow channels and bank terracing to enhance hydraulic connectivity within the bosque, and revegetating with native plants.

The Herring River Restoration Project in Massachusetts will replace the restrictive dike at the mouth of the river with a bridge that will allow tidal water to flow freely between the river and Wellfleet Harbor. This will restore the biodiverse, productive, estuary that existed pre-dike construction.  

Dams in the Penobscot River have prevented fish passage from the Gulf of Maine for centuries. To restore connectivity, the Penobscot River Restoration Trust built the largest nature-based fish bypass channel in the United States. This project will help restore Atlantic Salmon populations, and the cultural heritage of the Penobscot Nation.  

A collaborative effort among irrigators, conservation interests, regulatory agencies, local entities, and nonprofit organizations is working to restore the declining Colorado River Cutthroat Trout population in Abrams Creek, Colorado that had been impacted by water diversion. The team piped the ditch to improve the irrigation efficiency and conserved 40% of the diverted water.

A 1960s-era levee on the Dungeness River resulted in a straighter channel, increased water velocities, reduced habitat, and a decline in the effectiveness of the levee. This project removed part of the old levee, built a setback levee, and relocated a road bisecting the floodplain. 

This project aims to clear dead trees and debris deposited by Hurricane Andrew in 1992 from mangrove tidal passageways in Matheson Hammock Park on Biscayne Bay. In a five-year effort to prevent further damage to this sensitive habitat, the debris are removed by volunteers using canoes and manual labor instead of large machinery.

This project removed three aging dams and replaced a fourth on the Mill River in Taunton, Massachusetts to increase the area’s ecological and community resilience and reduce flooding. These efforts reconnected more than 48 kilometers of rivers and streams linked to Narragansett Bay. 

After the 2011 Missouri river Flood event, the sponsors of Levee L-575 pursued the Nonstructural alternative (NSA) of a levee setback under the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Disaster Operations Public Law 84-99 program. This setback relocated a segment of the levee from its current alignment to a location farther back from the banks. 

The Mud Mountain Dam in Enumclaw, Washington was not meeting fish-passage needs. Construction on a new trap-and-haul fish passage facility began in 2018. The new design is anticipated to move 60,000 fish per day. This facility will allow endangered species such as Chinook Salmon and Bullhead and Steel Trout to travel up-river to breeding grounds. 

The North Simpson Habitat Restoration Project aimed to improve the riprarian habitat on the floodplains of a near-perennial riparian area that came into existence since the 1970s as a consequence of municipal effluent discharge. Numerous native tree, shrub, grass, and forb species were planted in shallow water-harvesting basin to facilitate self-sustaining recovery.

To restore the endangered Silvery Minnow, the Bureau of Reclamation, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and the Save Our Bosque Task Force worked closely with a local landownerto restore approximately 0.8 river miles of critical habitat along the Rio Grande River. The project involved mechanical bank lowering and the creation of side channels and embayments.