Legacy road building and timber harvest practices in the 1960s in the Greenwater River cut the river off from its floodplain and the river was logged to its banks. The river was used to skid logs downstream, disturbing processes and tearing through complex habitat and instream structure.

In the absence of a mature floodplain forest and large accumulations of instream wood jams, the Greenwater River became an incised, single channel thread with oversized substrate inhospitable to spawning and rearing populations of salmon and trout.

In light of this, restoration was needed to bring back the salmon populations that the Greenwater River historically supported. Recovery of an entire subbasin is the work of many and SPSSEG has been working with project partners for decades to build a diverse funding portfolio to restore the Greenwater River that totals over $5.6 million to date.