Restoring our riverscapes

Altered state: Vermont’s streams and rivers

Humans have long altered our environment to carve out spaces for living, farming, travel, and community. We cleared forests, drained wetlands, flattened uneven ground, re-shaped rivers, and dug materials out of the earth. Over centuries, landscapes slowly went from wild to managed.

Now, as more intense floods and droughts hit Vermont, we’re facing the unintended consequences of those past actions. Roughly 75 percent of the state’s streams and rivers have been so altered that they can no longer function naturally, according to state data.

They’ve been straightened, deepened, dammed, and cut off from their floodplains. When massive storms hit, the water often has nowhere to go but into our communities, causing devastation.

“That alteration of our aquatic ecosystems has made flooding much more intense and frequent, worsened water quality, and eradicated habitat for many species,” says Matthew Thorne, The Nature Conservancy’s director of freshwater in Vermont.

We are learning that the fix isn’t more engineering to control where water goes and how waterways behave. It’s giving rivers back what they’re missing: the ability to connect to their floodplains and broader riverscapes. Connected floodplains and rivers improve water quality, flood resilience, and ecological integrity.

The Vermont Land Trust helps reconnect riverscapes in many ways. All new conservation easements include special protections for all streamside forest, and river corridor easements specifically provide space for rivers to move naturally in their valleys. In addition to these legal protections, VLT wants to actively jump-start the ability of rivers to regain their natural structure and processes. Two of the simplest, most effective tools for physically giving rivers and streams what they’re missing are adding wood back into streams and inviting beavers back to the landscape.

Wood and beavers slow water down, allowing sediment to settle rather than wash downstream, and rebuild the habitat fish and other species need.

“Most streams and rivers in the Northeast do not have enough wood in them to be healthy,” Matt says. “It’s like a body without bones. It needs bones.”

Photo: The Otter Creek watershed in Dorset, VT, where VLT removed a dam in 2024. Credit Fluid State Consulting.

Why our floodplains are broken

Long before Vermont was tamed by roads, dams, and fields, it was swampier, messier, and boggier — in a beautiful way. Shaped and maintained by a robust beaver population, the landscape had a greater capacity to absorb, slow, and filter water.

Then came the fur trade. By the mid-1800s, beavers were all but gone from the state. “A lot of our historic spaces in the lower parts of the watersheds were built in former beaver habitat,” says Allaire Diamond, VLT’s restoration and ecology program director. “Settlers understandably were drawn to these flat, fertile areas.”

By the 1940s and ’50s, people were also shaping waterways to make them clean, narrow, fast-moving, and tidy at the edges. Often funded with federal dollars, this reshaping increased in the mid-20th century. It helped define areas for human travel, farming, and settlement. It also forced rivers and streams into constrained channels with almost no flexibility. These narrow, defined rivers became part of the Vermont aesthetic.

“The perception of a stream being a very neat, contained, linear channel is just really not natural,” Matt says. “It’s an invented image, at least in Vermont.”

A stream naturally swells and spreads with rain and may even change its path over time, or flow via multiple channels. When rising waters can’t spread into the wider riverscape, they rush downstream with greater force. Increased rain and damaging floods, such as 2011’s Tropical Storm Irene and subsequent flood events, demonstrated how that force can wreak havoc on communities.

Photo: The Lee River on a conserved farm in Jericho, where VLT has been working to reduce erosion and flood risk by encouraging the growth of shrubs and trees along the banks and in the surrounding floodplain.