Habitat Restoration
Plants and animals, including birds and insects, seek out a variety of habitats. Humans can help reverse the degradation of native habitats in a number of ways.
Undercut erosion on the Green River. Photo credit: Mary Westervelt
Greening Greenfield’s Restoration work
Sustainability is the unifying concept of Greening Greenfield. On this website we have two focus areas: Climate & Biodiversity Restoration, and Community Building. The first is divided into the Programs we call Energy, Nature, and Materials. But these Programs, of course, overlap.
Similarly, “Nature” contains a huge number of intertwined concepts, that we have to find ways to discuss as if they were stand-alone topics.
For each of our Programs we divide the website into
- Aspects — topics and resources; and
- Initiatives — Action items, things GG works on, and often thing that you may participate in with us, or do at home.
Therefore, we invite you to explore some of the interrelated topics on our website, especially:
- the other Aspects: Invasive Plants, and What is a Pollinator Corridor; and
- the Initiatives: Building a Pollinator Corridor in Greenfield, Occasional Planting (and More!) Parties, and Removing Invasives; plus some of our
- Events.
GG’s current Restoration initiative is called Transforming Millers Meadow where we are trying to create a meadow and a small forest in an area that floods, while controlling invasive plants, including the vetch that was originally planted on purpose to control erosion on a slope.
Others’ Restoration Work
Much of the work we think of as “Restoration” is of rivers and floodplains, and we’re not the only ones engaging in this important work in Greenfield and the region (thank goodness).
When we were envisioning possibilities for Miller’s Meadow, the committee toured the Whetstone River Restoration site in Brattleboro. Then a larger group we got a very helpful tour of a South River Restoration site in Conway, both discussed briefly on our Flood Plain Field Trips page.
In Greenfield, we want to highlight two more projects along the Green River: FFRP, and the Mill St. dam partial removal.
Floodplain Forest Restoration Project
Along the Green River, the Greenfield Conservation Commission owns land just beyond the Green River Swimming and Recreation Area, where beautiful spring ephemerals (many labeled by Wisty) emerge on the slopes, and where invasive plants such as Japanese knotweed, Asiatic bittersweet, goutweed, and multi-flora rose take over the floodplain.
Wisty Rorabacher leads volunteers with the Floodplain Forest Restoration Project whose project does not plant native plants, but works to remove or control invasive plants to expose the native plants in the seed bank which come back with a lot of help from their friends.
Tuesdays and Sundays from 10-12 in all kinds of weather the group gathers. Join them! Email wistjud@gmail.com for details.
Green River by Mill Street Dam
Mill St Dam near Museum of Our Industrial Heritage.
Photo credit: Mary Westervelt
The City of Greenfield, Connecticut River Conservancy, and the Nature Conservancy are seeking to lower this dam (Greenfield Electric Light and Power dam) by the Museum of Our Industrial Heritage. The “Restoration” in this case is to bring back a more natural flow to the river.
While the dam will not be totally removed, due in part to City sewer infrastructure, lowering the dam and stabilizing the dam base will “provide the ecological benefits of a more natural river system, such as fish passage, improved water quality, and greater flood resistance.”
Bittersweet, honeysuckle, multi-flora rose in foreground; collapsed bank, orange knotweed in distance.
Photo credit: Wisty Rorabacher, 2026
Houses downstream of dam that the Green River could flood.
Photo credit: Mary Westervelt