Partnering with Beaver to Restore Colorado Mountain Riverscapes

hi i'm mark beardsley an ecologist and restoration practitioner with ecometrics in buena vista i'm here to talk to you about partnering with beavers to restore colorado mountain riverscapes but first close your eyes and try to picture the riverscape as i read to you looking back some 35 years we find trout creek a fine mountain stream banks lined with willows and shrubs well stocked with mountain trout the surrounding hills are covered with good stands of pine and fur and the parks are covered with thick grass the same section today presents a sadly different picture the mountain stream is converted to a deep gully with perpendicular walls at a boulderstone bottom the willows and shrubs are gone the timber's been cut from the hillsides and the grass has been replaced by a few stanza ping and sage while we're once mountain meadows are now barren peat beds you can open your eyes now is this what you pictured yeah me too when i read that but this is a different stream a neighboring stream the stream i just described to you is actually this one it's trout creek and most of you probably seen trout creek as you've driven along highway 285 coming down into bueno vista doesn't look at all like what i described does it it's kind of a lot sweeter what's the catch well what i didn't tell you is that the description i read came from a 1933 civilian conservation corps report and the video i just showed you is what that same riverscape looks like today back in the 1930s in the grips of the great depression a couple hundred out of work dudes descended on the degraded trout creek with hand tools willow stems and whatever materials they could gather on site to in their words bring back by human effort a portion of what man had destroyed those boys were doing low-tech process-based restoration and it worked why do you think it worked well i think it's because they had mother nature on their side by partnering with beavers they enabled nature's wetland ecosystem engineers beavers are the quintessential wetland ecosystem engineers their work supports species richness and landscape level heterogeneity they're the keystone species that maintains the health and resilience of the wetland ecosystems they live in people are decent engineers but when it comes to healthy streams and wetland beaver have way more experience in our book the beaver manifesto glennis hood reminds us that by the time early hominid ancestors appeared on this earth a short five million years ago beavers had already learned to cut wood and build homes caster canadensis the species of beaver we have here in colorado has been in north america for seven and a half million years humans on the other end have only been on this continent for 15 to 20 000 years roughly one tenth of one percent as long and until just a few hundred years ago there are lots more beavers than people here look at this little guy go beavers have everything you could want in a solid work partner smart hardworking meticulous persistent not to mention experienced and not afraid to get their hands dirty to hear us beaver aficionados talk it sometimes sounds like we're describing a comic book superhero that's going to swoop in and save us i'm guilty myself one of my favorite sweatshirts is a hoodie with the super beaver logo but of course they're just rodents there's nothing at all magical about them they have no superpowers but what they do have is an unusual array of evolutionary adaptations that makes them specialize for living in the water they have webbed feet and a big flat tail which makes them amazingly graceful swimmers eyes and ears specialize for life in the water they can hold their breath a really long time they have an extra flap of tissue behind their teeth that they can close and be able so that they're able to chew and bite stuff under the water and they're first so dense it keeps them dry and insulated they're also big and fat adult beavers tend to be around 60 to 70 pounds the size of a labrador retriever the fat they store all summer keeps them alive through long winters they're strict vegetarians and mountain beavers survive winter by catching branches underwater to eat when they get iced in more impressive than their adaptations to water however are their adaptations for manipulating their environment like most rodents they have fossorial four paws that's just a fancy word for they're good at digging and they have iron hard chisel teeth that they use to cut trees they're powerfully strong for their size and they have sensors that can detect moving water so they can plug it up lots of mammal species are adapted to life and water but the beaver's unique in its ability to create the very wetlands they need to survive in a long history of evolutionary development beavers came to inhabit arid environments like a rocky mountains not by adapting to dry conditions but by making dry places wet i shot this video while camping in taylor park this summer that mound of sticks you see in the middle of the pond it's a lodge that the beavers built themselves there's a dry chamber in the middle of there where where the beavers can hang out and the entrances are underwater this beaver is busy packing mud on the walls to make it hard and insulated for winter the leafy willows in front of the lodge that the beaver's swimming by right now there are food cache that the beavers put there when this pond freezes over which you'll probably be doing any day now the store of food remains accessible to them under the ice here's a picture of what a typical beaver lodge looks like in the winter the lodge is back to the right and that pile of sticks frozen in the ice is the top of a food cache most of it's under the under most of it's down below some of those bubbles that you see in the ice are actually frozen beaver breath from when they swim out from the lodge under the ice to sneak a snack these are just a few more pictures of beaverworld in winter and that's sarah marshall down in the lower right photo i don't think i've ever seen sarah not smiling not even when it's below zero as long as she's outside in a beavery wetland and this is just a cool picture my friend dave took of that same beaver in the video not only do beavers build those lodges in and around ponds they also build the ponds and wetlands themselves this is one of the kid beavers probably a one and a half year old packing mud and sticks onto a three foot tall beaver dam that dam that she's built is the sole reason that there's a pond and wetland here at all she's digging the mud up from the bed so she's actually making the pawn deeper in two ways by digging it down and by raising the water level up and here's dave displaying his photography skills again okay dave now you're just showing off the point of this is to help you understand why beavers do what they do it's just how they make a living beavers build their wetlands homes like their lives depend on it and that's because their lives do depend on it and so do the lives of so many other species colorado parks and wildlife refers to species like beaver's umbrella species that's because conservation of an umbrella species leads to the conservation of so many other species that depend on them beavers are umbrella species keystone species and ecosystem engineers all wrapped up in one here's the typical lodge in pond on a really teeny colorado creek you can see how wide this pond is combined with the network of tunnels canals and channels that beavers build it gives the beavers access to the full width of the valley without ever having to leave the water why walk when you could swim that's how beavers think so when we zoom out and look at the complex and yeah that's what we call them the wetlands that beavers create are called complexes well because they're complex when a beaver population begins to expand into multiple colonies the wetland expands too and while sites like this seem rare today a mere two to three hundred years ago most of colorado's broad mountain valleys were a lot like this sit and let that marinate for a while well that was just a few basics of beer biology if you want to learn more check out this presentation by tory ritter from the 2021 society wetlands scientist beaver webinar it's pretty awesome appreciation for beavers of skyrocketing if you're new there are plenty of good books you can read to get caught up on the beaver's awesomeness reading is great but there's no way you can really comprehend the complexity diversity and sheer magnificence of a healthy beaver complex until you spend time in one i'm serious get out there you need to if you're going to appreciate this stuff you should walk across one someday be prepared it's not going to be easy you'll understand why we call them complexes now go walk across a riverscape like this where the beavers are long gone by comparison it's like walking across a parking lot the complexity's gone too and so are many of the hydrological habitat and ecosystem benefits sadly this is the image of an ideal mountain meadow stream we all grew up with we all learned to draw lines or draw streams as as like squiggly lines depicting a single channel carving through an otherwise mostly dry landscape it's called ecological amnesia to the simple in-size channels that many of our streams have become beaver complexes are ecologically rich diverse resilient and dynamic left to their own devices beavers make a wonderful mess of things and that's precisely what makes them so valuable nice simple efficient stable this channel here where the beavers have been gone it's not messy at all it's also not particularly complex or healthy by comparison with the healthy beaver complex upstream this section of rough and tumbling creek is ecologically depopperate and functionally wimpy joe wheaton keeps reminding us complex wetland riverscapes are not anomalies they're natural they used to be common they could be common again we just have to reimagine what our riverscapes could be and when we do we'll realize that we have before us the potential to restore wetlands on a grand scale one can that can affect the function resilience of whole watersheds and that's because beaver riverscapes like this they're not only natural they're also the most complex and biologically rich habitats we have in the state they're stable resilient and self-sustaining wonderfully complex this is snowmass creek tennessee creek near leadville cucumber gulch near breckenridge one thing these amazingly complex rocky mountain riverscapes have in common is yep beavers by partnering with beavers we don't have to design and build wetlands all we have to do is help restore the wetlands that were there naturally for thousands of years before we disturbed them lena paul v and ellen wall studied rocky mountain alluvial valleys and determined that complex anti-branching beaver complexes likely dominated for most of the holocene simple in size single thread channels didn't show up until about 200 years ago uncoincidentally that's right when the beavers were trapped out new scientific models show that stream wetland corridors like beaver complexes are the natural pre-disturbance condition in most alluvial mountain valleys the condition we see so commonly today one where incise channels bisect mostly dry floodplain terraces is often the result of human disruption and the near extirpation of a keystone species that's one awfully big human disruption brian clewer and colin thorne's stream evolution model makes this clear the anastomosing wetland beaver complex is stage zero the inside single thread channel with the dry floodplain has evolved to stage three due to prolonged absence of beaver ellen wahl's recent front frontiers and earth sciences paper sums up the science nicely i highly recommend it the point is that biologically rich stream wetland beaver complexes get dried up and simplified when they devolve into simple in size channels and when this happens we lose valuable hydrological ecological and habitat functions the pies on this chart show the level of habitat and ecosystem benefits that go with each stage the shift from stage 0 beaver complex to a stage 3 in size channel represents a massive loss in wetland and a corresponding decrease in ecosystem services the good news is that by restoring these degraded wetlands we have an amazing opportunity to gain back a lot of what we've lost if beavers have what they need to survive they work indeed fatiguably to restore and maintain complex stream wetland corridors and that's because as we discussed earlier their lives depend on it deanna laurel and ellen wall describe it as a positive biological feedback loop the upper loop in this diagram when you have enough beaver dams you get backwaters and overbank flows these flows support wetland deciduous vegetation and multiple channels abundant wetland is the aquatic habitat and food that supports beaver beaver build more dams and ponds and the system keeps going round and round in a dynamic biological feedback loop that builds complexity and resilience yay ecology but when these biological processes shut down simple physical processes take over in another feedback that maintains simple in size channels with dry floodplains you can think of the feedback loop as a biological engine that keeps these wetland ecosystems dynamic complex and functioning it's an ecological machine and the cool thing is that as long as all the parts are there it functions totally on its own and it has been for thousands of years when you think about it like this your job as a restoration practitioner it's not to design and build these systems it's to get the important parts back in place so that natural processes can resume functioning that's why we call it process based restoration well the title of this session was how to obtain beaver benefits and if you've followed me so far you're probably starting to realize that it pretty much comes down to this you want beaver benefits restore beavers in their habitat i like the way chris jordan puts it it's forehead slappingly obvious go partnering with beaver to restore many degraded wetland riverscapes is an obvious path to better habitat more ecosystem services and more resilient watersheds so let's get to work of course just because the solution is obvious doesn't mean it's always easy working with biological systems is inherently complex there's so much we don't know and the learning curve is steep there are no guarantees we need to approach this with humility and that's not something most of us are used to but that doesn't mean we can't be bold partnering with beaver and using low-tech process based restoration approaches it's nothing like the commercial industrial version of stream restoration that's become popular and has become the norm over the past 30 years we have to break that mold and think about restoration a whole new way it's really about learning to work with nature rather than trying to control it you don't need engineering firms and huge teams of consultants you don't need giant construction companies and quarries imported rock and you don't need meticulous scientific data to prove you've even made a difference it doesn't have to cost a gazillion dollars as you'll see in the rest of my slides with some professional guidance expertise and experience and with a good dose of humility process-based restoration and partnering with beavers is something ordinary people can do to make a real difference and the benefits are obvious their forehead slappingly obvious speaking of ordinary people this is sherry tippy and thank you to aaron hall for this picture if you don't know who sherry tippy is go home tonight and watch sarah koenigsberg's movie the beaver believers sherry was a hairdresser who in the 1980s got upset when people were killing nuisance beavers in denver so she took it upon herself to live trap them instead and move them to the mountains 40 years have gone by and she's still at it nobody loves beavers more than sherry and her strategy of reintroducing beavers to wetland goes back at least 100 years the most audacious example was when idaho fish and game dropped beavers by parachute into the frank church wilderness hoping they would take seed and populate their riverscapes the idea makes sense if streams and wetlands were damaged by removing beavers how about we just put them back unfortunately though and despite what some folks might have you believe restoring degraded riverscapes is rarely as simple as just trucking in or parachuting in a few beavers and letting them do all the work if you drop off some beavers in a site like the one in the background one that already is good riparian vegetation and enough ponds and wetlands to support them then your efforts are actually replacing or enhancing just the beaver part of the machine so i say go for it it's certainly better than offing them and it might do a lot of good but as a big time restoration strategy beaver inner reintroduction seems to be effective only in places where all the other parts of the biological engine are already in place it's hard to scale this up to a level that solves the environmental and watershed problems that most of our watersheds are facing one of the reasons is that most if not many of our degraded riverscapes have unfortunately become totally inhospitable to beavers riverscapes like the one in this picture have nothing left of the machinery needing needed to support them there's no vegetation and therefore no food or building material and there's no ponds or wetlands or even relic dams to provide the aquatic habitat they need to survive you can't just drop a beaver off in a place like this and expect her to restore it from scratch you know that poor later beavers pleading please don't leave me here and while it looks bleak riverscapes like these are not a lost cause when it comes to partnering with beaver not like a long shot but you got to be ready you have to be in it for the long haul if you've got nothing left of that biological engine no beaver no beaver dams no ponds no wetland no vegetation then you've got a lot of work ahead of you to get these features back before it's ready for beavers i mean you can try to mimic beavers with beaver dam analogs and other treatments on sites like this but you better be ready to keep doing it for a really long time at least until the vegetation comes back only then can you expect long-term help from your beaver partners restoring native woody vegetation isn't always easy it usually requires innovation interventions and it always takes a long time well it's probably okay if it takes a long time we can be patient on streams like this this beaver restoration success i'm about to tell you about was all about riparian vegetation and it took more than a decade to unfold the left photo shows the reach in 2008 looking pretty much like it has since the 1800s the right photo shows the same spot in 2016 after planting willows and eight years of managing livestock and here it is in 2020 after the beavers decided there was enough food and shelter to move in look all the parts of the machine are back i'm all for playing the long game on difficult sights with poor vegetation but at the same time i say we take advantage of the even lower hanging fruit the super low hanging fruit so back up to rough and tumbling creek the degraded site i kept showing you earlier on this riverscape the stream is pretty much a simple in size single thread bowling alley of a channel and most of the riparian zone is no longer wet but in this case the woody riparian vegetation still intact our strategy on sites like this is to mimic beaver dams with beaver dam analogs to restore ponds and wetland and to select sites where we can reasonably expect beavers to to immigrate on their own there i finally said it beaver dam analogs bdas what most of you been waiting to hear about for the last 20 minutes well a bda is just that a beaver dam analog an analog of a beaver dam we try to make them as close to natural beaver dams as possible using the same materials that beavers use they're purposefully low tech and not at all complicated to build in fact they're actually really fun to build and you get an instant gratification but they're also meant to be temporary treatments that ultimately get absorbed into the riverscape here's some bdas we built a few years ago on cave creek you can see what we're trying to do here by mimicking the processes that beavers would normally provide at least until the beavers can come back over and take over you can read all about bdas and other low-tech process-based restoration approaches in the free yes i said free low-tech process based restoration of riverscape's design manual the immediate hydrological response to a beaver dam analog can be very impressive as these photos clearly show put in a dam create a pond voila but remember that bdas are temporary without beavers they're actually more like abandoned beaver dams than active beaver dams real active beaver dams work so well because beavers maintain them incessantly 24 7. just like that little beaver that i showed you in the video earlier and that's something nothing that's something that none of us can do the short-term goal of bda's is to mimic beaver dams the long-term goal is to promote and sustain beavers in the biological feedback loop they're part of that ecological machine our measure of success isn't just how a bda looks when we're done building it it's also about how well we promote it and sustain the machinery that keeps the wetland alive and functioning about five years ago joe wheaton and jeremy miestas did a webinar called cheap and tearful stream riparian restoration it was about using bdas but it was also about taking a fresh new approach to restoration compared to the old school engineering-based approach partnering with beavers to mimic promote and sustain natural processes well it's definitely cheap and as these smiles confirm it's also definitely cheerful it's also highly effective and i hope you agree the resources that you save by shifting from an engineering approach to a process based restoration approach they can be used to scale up the size of the areas we treat you can start measuring project sites in miles rather than feet and i think that's exactly what we have to do if we have any hope of making a real difference on stuff like climate change and biodiversity loss this is sheep park another site in pike national forest we're working on down in the bottom right is where we camp this summer the dried out riparian area on the left is our project it's over two miles long there's an active beaver complex at the headwaters in the distance our goal here is to help those beavers upstream expand downstream and make the wetland wet again aaron hall who will be hearing from later in this uh summit he helped us out for the better part of a week and that's his little orange tent down there not a bad place to hang not a bad place to hang your head aaron those trees are where where we camped those are bristle cones that are probably 1200 years old more than three-fourths of their lives were spent before the first trapper ever arrived in colorado how about that this is aaron and our friend vicky putting in some posts and a bda driving post is fun but the novelty wears off pretty fast lots of our bdas like this one don't have posts this bda raised the water up about two feet to create a pond and activate side channels well yeah we might have gone a little overboard with the posts on this one these photos are from aaron who thankfully took the time to stop and shoot a little time sequence of the construction of this bda there's an amazing amount of plant material in a big bda like this and it's a lot of work but it's fun work and effective here's what it looked like when we walked away the goal on this one was to get the water high enough so it would activate beaver canals on both sides of the channel when you're working at this scale you can't get too caught up in the performance of any one treatment we're looking for a system-wide responses so check this out those shots are about a week apart actually they're about two weeks apart though most of these treatments are happening in the inside channel what we're looking for is a response that comes across the riverscape on super low hanging fruit sites like this a lot of the relic beaver infrastructure still present we're just helping the water find it again check it out one more time before after the treatments and i told you ordinary people can do this and who says work can't be fun fun in school anyways here's jessica during her best mimicry and if you start cutting and hauling sod you'll get an instant appreciation for the beaver's tenacity and strength now we're on reader creek near kremling more posts that guy in the center of the frame is paul planer one of our close partners lives in gunnison reader creek's a blm site and that guy on the left is ed rumbolt state level blm hydrologist he came to me two years ago with the idea to do low-tech beaver restoration demo projects on blm districts across the state he was thinking that if we just get this thing started and if we involve as many local people as possible it'll open up the floodgates for this kind of restoration statewide good plan ed something like 20 blm staff came out to help on reader creek the week we were there these young energetic folks are the future of restoration and the future of public land stewardship it's learning by doing and it's leading by example a lot of worry and a lot of handwringing going on about how we're going to amplify this kind of work statewide and this is my plan to do good work to do as much of it as we can and to involve as many people as we can to be open and honest about the results and to keep learning speaking of young people here's paula belcher she's been managing these blm lands for a long time reader creek was her idea and here's a quick before treatment and after treatment shots from reader they kind of speak for themselves i think this is my favorite bda picture i've ever taken strength in numbers baby now let's go back to the national forest gunnison ranger district this is trail creek in taylor park and this would be a pretty nice riparian corridor except that it has one of those big in size gashes running through the center of it and it has no beavers this site's about three miles long and this photo is just looking at the bottom mile and this is the a team i call them the a-team because all their names start with a also because they're awesome ashley hahm ashley merkel from the forest service and ali deljitsi a local contractor from gunnison one of our favorite partners what started about a year ago is their combined curiosity about beavers it rapidly evolved into a group called the gunnison valley beaver believers restoration on trail creek is happening because of them gunnison valley beaver believers are as eager as the beavers they endorse at one point we had something like 40 people busy working a drone a film crew a newspaper reporter and dignitaries from the forest service and national forest foundation all on this site at once it was kind of crazy but there was lots of learning and lots of doing that guy in the color full shirt there that's scott hatfield of the beaver working group and that's paul planer working with nicole fox also from the beaver working group and her thing is called give a damn more mimicking beavers the trail creek project brought together folks from several forest service districts high country conservation advocates gunnison county sustainable tourism and outdoor recreation and a bunch more ordinary people who just wanted to do what they could to help beavers the project was sponsored by national forest foundation it was funded by coca-cola turns out that coke and pbr go pretty well together cheap and cheerful i'll finish with a few quiet shots of the work on trail creek again it speaks for itself but it's the big picture that matters this is the lower part of the project reach this was a as an abandoned beaver dam at the upper part um well let's just see how the responses looked before treatment about a week and a half later after treatments again it's these low super low hanging fruit sites that i think are most exciting most of that beaver created infrastructures there just helping the water find it again there's an ecosystem engineer with 5 million years experience anxious to partner with us in restoring colorado mountain riverscapes and what i learned this summer is that there's an amazing number of eager people who want to help too let's help them help us thank you

Channel: Mark Beardsley

Views: 9,434

Keywords:

Id: 8aq8eVeoAg0

Length: 34min 22sec (2062 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 21 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Impossible_Driver_50]

Phenomenal documentary

gives me some hope for the bleak ass fucking future

[u/dabiiii]

Really cool, thanks!

[u/Dan_Flanery]

Is there any hope that this kind of restoration could help mitigate the kind of firestorm we just saw in Colorado if it were done intensively statewide?