Connecting people and sharing resources to advance the beaver's keystone role

in watershed health

Photo Credit: Mike Digout

In September 2024, a 25 year historic flood hit Box Elder Creek. This sequence shows the action during (above), and one day after (below), the event. Photo Credit: Brenda Brady

Planning for Beavers, Planning for Water: Lessons from Box Elder Creek

There aren't many trees that grow in the prairies of central Montana, but the box-elder is one. With ash-like leaves and maple-like seeds, this woody species is native east of the Rocky Mountains, where it thrives along streams. It became a sign of water to early settlers, who gave its name to a creek in what is now Petroleum County. But with heavy tilling, historic overgrazing, and the removal of beaver, the creek's hold on its name went slack. Streambanks degraded. Native riparian plants diminished. Core habitats for sage grouse and migration corridors for mule deer, elk, and antelope were lost. The quality and quantity of water itself, on which all such life depends, suffered drastic declines.

But the story hasn't stopped there. Local landowners, the Bureau of Land Management, Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks, World Wildlife Fund, Winnett ACES, and Anabranch Solutions have teamed up to find a better future for Box Elder Creek. Working across public and private lands, this mighty alliance of partners saw success in their 2024 season, and Rose Vejvoda - a recent Freshwater Ecosystems Intern at the Natural Resources Defense Council in partnership with BLM - captured the inspiring context and achievements of this summer's low-tech process based restoration (LTPBR) work here. As the project unfolded, the sudden return of live beavers seemed to culminate a successful partnership. These were some of the first castorids in decades, finally returning with the reformed grazing practices, and they would be critical to advancing long-term recovery for Box Elder Creek.

But at the time, nobody knew about the coming 25-year flood event of September, which, in the course of a day, unleashed a whopping five inches of rain. It started out slow, the dry dust jumping up with each pelting drop. But then it grew steady, then surged, and before long the banks were far beyond full. The channel of the creek was no longer visible, and entire LTPBR structures were submerged. The natural dams of the recovering beavers seemed at risk of being swept away, too.

Then, a day after the deluge, Box Elder Creek also revealed resilience. Of the 20 LTPBR structures built prior to the flood, only one endured significant functional loss (it's posts were not angled well enough, and it might not have endured such end-cutting if they had been securely wedged into the earth). The beaver-built dams, made without posts of any kind, came through the flood entirely unscathed. We may never know the full effects of these structures, but, compared to their absence, each surely slowed, spread, and diversified the waters, nutrients, and sediments of the immense flows.

The event serves as a reminder of how dramatic and erratic prairie watersheds can be. Our global changes to the climate result in local challenges we can't always predict. But we can prepare and adapt, and this event helped Bonny Richard see how much we tend to underestimate. We tend to gauge flows and implement LTPBR work when the systems are dry, but we need eyes to see what's possible when they're moist, wet, or even drowned. We also need the insight to modify our structures with beavers, the original and ultimate maintainers of these systems through millennia of change. Thanks to a more diverse, complex riparian zone with willows, box-elders, and other woody plants, this vision is becoming reality.

A hands-on crew from the Montana Conservation Corps builds a LTPBR structure below an erosive cutbank, hoping to reconnect Box Elder Creek with more of its floodplain, avoid continued incision, and entice beavers to return. Photo Credit: Rose Vejvoda

A natural beaver dam along Box Elder Creek, showcasing the resilient, resourceful integrity of a structure made entirely of locally available materials, using only teeth and feet. Photo Credit: Bonny RIchard

Montana Beaver Working Group - Virtual Meeting

December 11, 2024 / Zoom

Please join us for the annual December meeting of the Montana Beaver Working Group! This two-hour, virtual event will include a presentation from FWP with the latest from a statewide beaver dam census for Montana, and progress updates on the four goals of our Montana Beaver Action Plan:

• Goal 1: Integrate and expand beaver in the design and approach of stream and wetland restoration
• Goal 2: Restore beaver-modified public lands to sustain ecological processes, support biodiversity, and build resilience to drought, wildfires, and flooding
• Goal 3: Provide coordinated education and outreach on the benefits of beavers and beaver-related restoration
• Goal 4: Streamline legal and policy obstacles to beaver habitat restoration and relocation of beavers to suitable prioritized habitat.

This is a great opportunity to learn from our diverse range of members working in beaver restoration, conflict resolution, education, monitoring, and research, and also to see how you can contribute, too. Please RSVP for the event here.

Spring 2025 Low-Tech Process-Based Restoration Courses

Utah State University Restoration Consortium 

Spring 2025 (Registration begins on Nov 14, 2024)

The purpose of the Low-Tech Process-Based Restoration (LT-PBR) workshop series is to provide restoration practitioners with guidelines for implementing a subset of low-tech tools—namely beaver dam analogues (BDAs) and post-assisted log structures (PALS)—for initiating process-based restoration in structurally-starved riverscapes. We will describe ‘low-tech process-based restoration’ (LT-PBR) as a practice of using simple, low unit-cost, structural additions (e.g. wood and beaver dams) to riverscapes to mimic functions and initiate specific processes. Hallmarks of this approach include:

• An explicit focus on the processes that a low-tech restoration intervention is meant to promote
• A conscious effort to use cost-effective, low-tech treatments (e.g. hand-built, natural materials, non-engineered, short-term design life-spans) because of the need to efficiently scale-up application.
• ‘Letting the system do the work’ which defers critical decision making to riverscapes and nature’s ecosystem engineers

Introduction to LT-PBR: Jan 7, 14, & 21

Planning of LT-PBR: Jan 28 & Feb 4, 11

Science and Case Studies of LT-PBR: Feb 18 & 25, & Mar 4

Design of LT-PBR: Mar 18, 25 & Apr 1

Implementation of LT-PBR: Apr 8 & 12* (* = Field Trip in Logan, UT)

Adaptive Management of LT-PBR: Apr 15 & 22

Courses can be taken invidually or as a series. Learn more here.

Conceptualization of sources of sediment retained by panels (a) beaver dams and (b) beaver dam analogs.

Image Credit: Westbrook, C. J., & Cooper, D. J. (2024). Comparing the sources of sediment retained by beaver dams and beaver dam analogs. Water Resources Research, 60, e2024WR037717. https://doi.org/10.1029/2024WR037717

Comparing the sources of sediment retained by beaver dams and beaver dam analogs

C.J. Westbrook and D.J. Cooper

Water Resources Research, October 2024

When building dams, beavers shift the flow and storage of sediment through streams. But where does the sediment stored by beaver dams come from, and how do those origins compare with those of beaver dam analogues? With novel applications of "sediment fingerprinting" - a technique using elemental signatures and other tracers to select and compare sediment properties from site of source and deposit - researchers set out to consider these questions in the Canadian Rocky Mountains. They determined that the earth retained by beaver dams is different and more diverse than the earth impounded by BDAs, with natural beaver structures recruiting comparatively more sediment through canal building and terrace inundation, and BDAs drawing more readily from bank erosion. Given the many ways that sediment disturbance patterns can effect the quality, quantity, diversity, stability, and connectivity of riparian habitats, these findings offer a vital nuance to help restoration ecologists more effectively integrate and emulate the beaver's watershed niche. To learn more about these new developments to our understanding of beaver, sediment, and watershed health, see here.

Study site locations, beaver locations and eDNA detections for beaver translocations in Washington State, USA, 2020–2022. Red stars on maps indicate initial release locations for beavers, squares indicate centroid locations for individual beavers for each tracking interval (24 h, first week and 1 month plus), yellow circles indicate eDNA sample locations, and circle size indicates the proportion of positive eDNA sample replicates. Blue lines are stream networks generated using DEMs, and gray arrows indicate the direction of flow in each system. Site abbreviations are as follows: SC = Snowy Creek, SH = South Helens, DC = Deer Creek and LBM = Lone Butte Meadows.

Image Credit: Burgher, J.A.S., Goldberg, C.S., Duke, A.C.K., Garrison, S. and Piovia-Scott, J. (2024), Assessment of environmental DNA for detecting and monitoring translocated North American beaver. Anim. Conserv.. https://doi.org/10.1111/acv.12970

Assessment of environmental DNA for detecting and monitoring translocated North American beaver

J.A.S. Burgher, C. S. Goldberg, A. C. K. Duke, S. Garrison, J. Piovia-Scott

Animal Conservation, July 2024

Radio-tracking translocated beavers comes with a number of potential challenges for restoration practitioners and the animals themselves, but noninvasive methods to monitor beaver presence with eDNA have been on the rise. Coauthors from Washington State University and Washington Department of Fish & Wildlife have now put the latest and greatest tools for this question to the test, using "eDNA sampling paired with radio-tracking of translocated beavers at four relocation sites from October 2020 through October 2022 to elucidate spatial patterns of site use, eDNA detection probability, and eDNA quantity." They found that eDNA is remarkably sensitive upstream and downstream, with strong potential for rapid inventory and assessment of beaver occupancy. To learn more about their methods, results, and applications, see the full open-access paper here.

Alberta Beaver Beneficial Management Practices - Interactive Decision Tree

Working with Beavers / Miistakis Institute / Cows & Fish

Fall 2024

To a beaver, a "decision tree" may not seem as enticing as an aspen or cottonwood. But to those of us charged with myriad, multi-factor choices for beaver restoration, this is a species with a bang in every bite. Our industrious neighbors to the north have released a particularly inspiring decision tree, featuring not only clear pathways to sensisble actions, but also interactive links to the Alberta Beaver Beneficial Management Practices guide, which describes each step in compelling detail. While there are certainly some adaptations to be made for different contexts in Montana, these exciting resources can remind us of the options and keep us moving through challenges. Explore these tools here.

Best Management Practices for Tree and Crop Protection: A guide for using fencing to coexist with beavers

Project Beaver

Fall 2024

Good fences make good beavers. To build a good fence, we need to weave diverse strands of knowledge, from foresight in beaver behavioral ecology to what materials are worth buying at the hardware store. To size a circle of fence around a tree, we even need to know how to use the old circumference equation, C = πd. Thankfully, a new guide has all nuance we need for focused success in protecting trees and crops from beavers. Project Beaver's Best Management Practices for Tree and Crop Protection: A guide for using fencing to coexist with beavers is a useful, elegant document that teems with examples, illustrations, planning guidance, and modifications based on years of hands-on experience. Check it out here. And to stay up to speed on Project Beaver's full set of resources like this, check out their full canon of Best Management Practice Guides and Beaver 101 one-pager handouts here.

Program Coordinator

Sun River Watershed Group

Great Falls, MT

Applications Due: Open Until Filled

The Sun River Watershed Group, which "works collaboratively to protect and restore the resources of the Sun River watershed and its communities," is seeking a full-time program coordinator. If you are experienced in natural resources and conservation and want to help serve in one of Montana’s most beautiful and dynamic watersheds, check out how you can apply here.

Photo Credit: Rob Rich

Please send photos, stories, upcoming events, opportunities, and other resources to:

Shelby Weigand - Riparian Connectivity Manager,

National Wildlife Federation

WeigandS@nwf.org

MT Beaver Working Group newsletters are posted online here.