Riparian Habitat Restoration

Together with our team, including fire mitigation experts, scientists, personal donors, conservationists, volunteers and an extensive list of allies including Colorado Forest Service and Colorado Parks and Wildlife; we are implementing a long term plan to restore Beaver habitat along the local riparian corridors. The first step is locating viable habitat to restore. We are beginning the restoration in the lowlands of Cottonwood Creek. Once the habitat is sufficient to support Beaver family (which is likely to take years according to the below mentioned assessment), we can then start to re-locate Beaver and install Beaver Deceivers. Beaver Deceivers control the amount of water being dammed, and let a certain amount of flow through, to prevent flooding, allowing us to work in partnership with the Beavers and the needs of the local environment.

This is also a long-termfire mitigation strategy. Part of the bigger vision is to create a blueprint of mapping technology correlating Beaver habitat with the history of fire impacts to show the incredible efficacy they have in terms of protecting land from wild fires . We are initiating this project in Crestone and slowly aim to expand to include the whole of the San Luis Valley and potentially beyond.

As part of our plan we recently commissioned a “Crestone Area Beaver Restoration Opportunity Assessment”.

This is a 26 page assessment undertaken by Restoration Ecologist Alison Del Gizzi of Arable Earth

https://www.arableearth.com/restoration.

It shows that our land here is highly degraded and severely in need of the restoration of riparian habitat, and why it is set to be such a long-term process that we need to be prioritizing as a community.

If you are interested in viewing the assessment, please reach out through our “contact us” page.

A brief description of the technology used is as follows:

Beaver-based low-tech process-based restoration (LTPBR) is an increasingly popular tool being used to restore riverscape health where beaver complexes naturally existed prior to human disturbance. Site selection and context are critical factors in determining the success of any LTPBR project. Using a framework defined by Beardsley & Doran 2022 we systematically evaluated stream reaches within a defined region surrounding Crestone, CO using evidence from aerial imagery, topography, and other readily available GIS data—to assess beaver-based LTPBR potential and triage restoration opportunities according to impairments, limitations, feasibility, and benefit/cost analysis in the study area. Primary limiting factors included beaver population impairment, hydrology prone to damaging peak flows and periods of very low flows, and degraded riparian vegetation. The beaver population across the study area is severely limited. 91% of streams have no evidence of well-established beaver activity in the past 30-50 years and only three kilometers (1%) of streams were responsible for 60% of the current dams. The best restorable capacity opportunities are on headwater streams with areas of moderate gradient, less anthropogenic impairment, and less intensive land use. We identified 10.7 kilometers of stream corridor as having the best and 2.8 kilometers as having good long-term benefit-to-cost ratio for beaver-based LTPBR efforts.

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