WILD Grad Student Emma Doden Wins Prestigious Robins Award

Wildland Resources graduate student Emma Doden is this year’s recipient of the Master Student Researcher of the Year award at the 2021 USU Robins Awards. Emma studies beavers and their effects on riparian ecosystems. As part of the USU Beaver Translocation Study (a partnership between USU Department of Wildland Resources, Department of Watershed Sciences, and Ecology Center), she focuses on the movements and dam-building activities of beavers translocated to desert waterways, a particular area of research that has not yet been fully explored.

That’s right, baby. Moving beavers wins grad student of the year award. Boy howdy those beavers sure picked a winner!

In an environment where their activities may come into conflict with human beings, beavers can be regarded as ‘nuisance animals’ and are often killed. Recognizing beavers’ potential to be ‘ecosystem engineers’ and to significantly alter habitat for the betterment of wildlife and plant communities, the Beaver Translocation Study aims to see if some of these ‘problem animals’ can be put to work. Over the past two years, Emma and her team have relocated over 40 beavers (many from the USU Beaver Rehabilitation and Relocation Center in Millville, Utah) to the Price and San Rafael Rivers in central Utah. While some beavers moved away from the relocation sites or perished, the team found that many of the translocated beavers stayed nearby and built dams along these rivers.

Yes it’s a dam shame that her thesis isn’t on letting beavers be ecosystem engineers right where they are but we’ll cover that story next time.

The study will continue for the next two years, during which the team will build beaver dam analogs, man-made structures that imitate the function of beaver dams. The analogs may make conditions more hospitable for the animals to initiate dam building and call these streams their homes. Analogs have been used across North America to help return beavers to areas that have been deeply eroded. The hope is that through these efforts, beavers will create local wetlands that can elevate water tables, reduce channelization, and enhance fish habitat.

Emma would like to thank everyone who has collaborated on her work, especially her advisors Drs. Julie Young and Phaedra Budy. “Without the support of people from numerous agencies and organizations, I would not have been able to execute a study of this size and scope so successfully,” she says.

Congratulations to Emma on this honor!

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Who knew they even had award ceremonies for this kind of thing? Not I. that’s for sure. Congratulations Emma for letting people do exactly what they would like with beavers and turning it into a masters thesis! People would rather move a problem than kill it.

But they would rather do either than FIX IT.

Here’s a little award ceremony of my own I’ve been enjoying since last week.

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Emma Doden