Restoring Beaver Habitat

Beaver are a “Keystone Species”;  the cornerstone of aquatic ecosystem and which provide up to 85% of habitat for plants, forests, animals, fish, birds, etc.

It is estimated that between 60 million and 400 million beaver were extirpated from North America during the 1800’s. This left much of the riparian zones in the landscape unattended and helped to cause land dehydration and uncharacteristically intense wildfire behavior. Help us return this native, keystone species to the Colorado landscape to increase soil hydration, return natural stream flows, enhance native biodiversity, including Cutthroat trout and Monarch butterflies, and lower wildfire intensity.

The Creeks, waterways and surrounding habitat in Crestone and other areas in the San Luis Valley are suffering from a steep decline in health and biodiversity. The land is drying up and the forests are dying. This poses a problem for fire mitigation and drought, amongst other things. 

This will only change with direct action and the time is now! 

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.

We recently commissioned a “Crestone Area Beaver Restoration Opportunity Assessment” .

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.

Be a Beaver Hero and help us all be BeaverWise!