As if we needed to be reminded, TU has lept onto the beaver stage to get involved in the mostly one-sided beaver debate.
New mapping tool puts beavers to work for Upper Columbia fisheriesCrysta
Beavers and trout anglers are not strangers. Many of us have been startled while standing knee-deep in a trout stream when something big and brown and way larger than the fish we are targeting suddenly slips past.
Beavers can cause headaches for land managers as they engineer streams and ponds to their purposes without even a cursory nod toward collaboration with other interested parties. Then again, these same ponds can be great places to catch decent-sized trout.
Increasingly though, Trout Unlimited and other like-minded groups are turning to beavers — and certainly taking inspiration from them — to help restore resiliency to degraded public lands and waters.
Well obviously. You’d look to the expert to teach you how to solve watershed problems. Why should we be surprised beavers are at the head of the class?
That means adapting to climate change, creating habitat and maintaining water supply.
Focused in the right places, beaver-powered restoration can be a priceless tool. In Washington’s Upper Columbia River Basin, TU restoration and science staff have partnered with local agencies, universities, tribes and, well, beavers to develop a tool to help plan this kind of work at a landscape level.
In the aftermath of Washington’s recent mega-fires, TU realized the critical need to scale up beaver-powered restoration work to re-establish climate change resilience in the Upper Columbia.
While fire is an important component of natural ecosystem process in the Upper Columbia, the combination of uncharacteristically severe wildfires in recent years and watershed modifications (e.g., logging, roads, etc.) often results in higher degrees of sedimentation and other impacts to aquatic systems than would naturally occur. Beaver dams and their resulting wetland complexes buffer these effects, enhancing water availability both for humans and for fish species.
You know what I find works really good for preventing fires? Water and wetlands. You know what makes those more plentiful, right?
In order to maximize impact, we needed to create these ecological benefits at a watershed level. We wanted to think beyond individual projects and look at a landscape perspective in terms of prioritizing sites for, 1) improving habitat for Endangered Species Act-listed salmon, steelhead and bull trout, 2) increasing water storage capacity, and 3) buffering fire effects.
Utah State University’s Beaver Restoration Assessment Tool (BRAT) is currently the best model restoration practitioners have for digging into the feasibility question, but we needed a more broadly-focused tool to drill down to where beaver-powered restoration could do the most good in the Upper Columbia’s post-mega fire landscape where critical fish populations are struggling to survive.
Hot off the press, TU’s Upper Columbia Beaver-Powered Restoration Decision Support System (DSS) tool helps aid conservation specialists and agency staff in the identification of beaver-powered restoration opportunities across the Upper Columbia, including BDA installation, beaver relocation, and low-tech wood placement, such as post-assisted log structures (PALS).
In a nutshell, this tool provides a powerful landscape-level analysis to serve as a first-order filter for identifying the most impactful, high priority areas for beaver-powered restoration work in a critical basin for salmon and agriculture. The region is also on the front lines of mega fire impacts and climate change – making it a place where beaver-powered restoration is needed most.
They used the BRAT to find out where BDA’s could do the most good, and they worked to bring them about. Now its up to the beavers themselves to do the rest.
Simply put, we have learned a lot from beavers in ways we can help protect our most important fisheries from the ravages of climate change. We know how to utilize their skillsets to restore resiliency to our home waters. Our Upper Columbia Beaver-Powered Restoration DSS and field data collection tools help us to make smarter and more efficient decisions in where we apply these tools. We’ll spend some time in the lab with the DSS this winter and by spring we will be ready to take the field data collector to potential sites and get started with more beaver-powered restoration.
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Gosh I think Trout Unlimited in the west is doing some outstanding beaver advocacy. Remind me to invite them to speak at the California Beaver Summit will you?
