Every winter, a small, federally threatened fish leaves the rivers of northwest Georgia and pushes upstream into tiny, groundwater-fed seeps to spawn. At first glance, the seeps look unremarkable; shallow water barely moving through leaf litter and mud. But for the trispot darter (Etheostoma trisella), found only in the Coosa River Basin of Alabama, Georgia, and Tennessee, these places are some of the only spawning habitat it has left.

Across the Conasauga and Coosawattee watersheds, more than a thousand road-stream crossings stand between this fish and the habitat it depends on, many of them too narrow, too high, or too degraded for a two-inch fish to climb.

The Georgia Department of Natural Resources is leading a basin-wide effort to find and fix those barriers, in partnership with The Nature Conservancy, Limestone Valley Resource Conservation and Development Council, and a wide network of federal, academic, and community partners. The project combines systematic road-crossing assessment using a standardized regional protocol with environmental DNA sampling that maps exactly where the species is still trying to spawn, then directs limited funding toward the crossings whose replacement will reconnect the most habitat. County governments have become active partners in this effort, cost-sharing replacements that serve both conservation and local infrastructure needs.