At the beginning of 2025, we knew it was time to make bold moves into new terrain.
Though based in Nashville, Tennessee, the Cumberland River Compact’s work stretches from the headwaters of the Cumberland River in central Appalachia to the farmlands of western Tennessee and Kentucky. This vast region of the southeastern U.S. is rich in plant and animal biodiversity, shaped by distinct environmental microclimates, and home to both booming cities and deeply rooted rural communities. It also offers extraordinary opportunities for innovative, high-impact restoration.
We’re proud to say that in 2025, the Compact completed work at more sites across the 18,000-square-mile watershed than ever before, spanning the widest geographical range in the organization’s history.
At the heart of everything we do are people. Individuals and communities inspire and power effective water stewardship, and it’s our honor to partner with them across the Cumberland River basin. Together, we’re improving the shared resource that connects us all: clean, abundant fresh water.
One of the most powerful things about water work is that every improvement flows downstream, benefiting the next watershed. It’s the ultimate act of paying it forward. If you volunteered, donated, attended an event, or supported the Compact in any way in 2025, you made the projects below possible.
We’ll share selected projects with you as the water flows, west to east, across eight of the fourteen watersheds in the Cumberland River basin.
In the foothills of Appalachia, deep in Eastern Kentucky’s coal country, the Cumberland River begins as a cluster of mountain springs. It’s here that the Compact focuses its mine land reforestation program, which transforms barren, previously mined land into native forests.
In late 2025, the Compact broke ground on a 150-acre parcel of previously mined land – our largest mine land reforestation project to date. When the project is complete, more than 100,000 seedlings will have been planted.
This project is only part of the Compact’s mine land reforestation work in 2025, which also included the successful planting of nearly 50,000 seedlings at two other sites in Kentucky.
Mine land reforestation is an investment in future generations. Restored forests will provide habitat for songbirds and wildlife, create shaded spaces for recreation, absorb stormwater to reduce flooding, and keep pollution out of nearby waterways.
In the summer of 2025, teachers from 10 Tennessee counties gathered in Cookeville for a two-day retreat led by the Compact’s Education team. Teachers toured the Putnam County water treatment plant, kayaked local waters, and engaged in classroom learning to deepen their understanding of water resources, human impacts on water quality, and how to bring these lessons back to students.
This retreat is part of a broader school district partnership model – one of the only programs of its kind in the U.S. Through district partnership, the Cumberland River Compact trains science teachers on integrating cutting-edge instructional strategies with recently adopted environmental science curriculum.
This ensures that today’s kids will learn about water conservation and how to care for their water resources for future generations.
Root Nashville is a citywide urban forestry campaign, led by the Cumberland River Compact and Metro Nashville, with the goal to plant 500,000 trees in Davidson County by 2050. In McMinnville, Tennessee, the Compact’s partner nursery grows thousands of Root Nashville trees from seed.
The nursery’s sustainable practices conserve water, replace plastic with compostable cloth bags, and prioritize climate-resilient, diverse tree species. By partnering with a nearby nursery, the Compact can provide Nashvillians with large trees that are optimized for our weather and soil and best chances for long-term survival. The pipeline of trees from McMinnville to Nashville continues to grow: in 2025, the Compact planted more Root Nashville trees than in any year previous.
In 2025, the Compact became an accredited land trust– a designation that means we meet the highest standards of excellence and permanence in the conservation easements we protect and maintain.
One protected site is along Stewart Creek, where the removal of a manmade dam in 2023 restored 9,000 feet of free-flowing stream.
During fall monitoring, the Compact’s Stream Restoration team observed increased stream diversity, thriving native plants, and even a family of otters. Through the land trust program, restoration projects like the one completed at Stewart Creek will be protected in perpetuity.
Old Hickory Lake is a beloved segment of the Cumberland River where recreation and waterfront living are important parts of many people’s daily lives. In 2025, the Compact teamed up with 95 volunteers for six cleanup events in the Old Hickory Lake watershed.
This series of clean-ups at Old Hickory Lake is just one way the Compact engages the public through municipality partnerships. These collaborations with cities such as Hendersonville, Gallatin, and Goodlettsville connect residents with hands-on opportunities to care for their waterways.
Year-round, the Compact hosts volunteer cleanups around Nashville and surrounding communities. Community members and corporate partners remove thousands of pounds of litter from riverside habitats each year.
A series of North Nashville projects pushed the Cumberland River Compact’s depave initiative past a major milestone in 2025: more than 100,000 square feet of pavement removed since the program’s start in 2018. We celebrated this milestone with the groundbreaking of a special project: the removal of over 2,000 feet of concrete from the campus of Meharry Medical College in North Nashville.
This project brought together community leaders, Meharry students and faculty, and Compact staff to celebrate a new era of prioritizing environmental and public health outcomes in the city. The green spaces created will absorb stormwater, reduce flooding, and cool surrounding neighborhoods.
Live stakes (small cuttings from native trees that will eventually branch out and form their own root systems) are installed in the recently regraded banks of a Franklin stream. In partnership with the City of Franklin, the Compact completed a three-year stream restoration project on a Harpeth River tributary in Pinkerton Park. The project stabilized eroded banks and restored 1,320 feet of stream with native plantings, while offering park visitors a firsthand look at how restoration improves water quality.
In the Red River watershed, farmland dominates the landscape, making farmers essential partners in protecting water quality. In 2025, the Compact began loaning out an industrial roller-crimper to help farmers adopt cover cropping more easily. Cover crops improve soil health and reduce erosion, keeping sediment and pollutants out of waterways. One farmer, T.C. Groves, used the crimper on 1,000 acres of his family land and convinced two nearby farmers to try it as well.
The Compact also expanded its efforts to support farmers through the River Friendly Farms program, which recognizes farmers who are exceptional environmental stewards. Farmers statewide, not just in the Cumberland River basin, can apply to be a River Friendly Farm. The River Friendly Farms Grazing School teaches livestock farms rotational grazing techniques to improve soil health and assists with fencing projects that protect waterways.
Next Year’s Horizons
From fields to mountains, streams to skyscrapers, the Cumberland River basin is as diverse as the solutions required to protect it. As we look toward 2026, the Compact is committed to finding those solutions – expanding our reach and adapting our work to serve communities from the headwaters in Harlan, KY to where the Cumberland meets the Ohio River in Paducah, KY and everywhere in between.
The Compact keeps growing, and so do the environmental challenges in the American southeast. That’s why our projects in 2026 will be bigger than ever before. In the rugged hills of the Caney Fork watershed, near beloved Fall Creek Falls and Rock Island State Parks, we expect to break ground on the longest stream restoration project in Tennessee history this spring. The project will protect approximately 170 acres and 10 miles of stream in an area known as “Fire Tower,” where our staff helped inoculate ancient hemlocks against disease back in 2023.
Like those hemlocks – fortified so they can continue to anchor and shade the watershed for generations – our work is rooted in the belief that thoughtful stewardship today sustains the life of the river tomorrow.
