PRESENTER AND TOPIC |
ABSTRACT |
Mark Beardsley - EcoMetrics Colorado "Partnering with Beaver to Restore Streams and Wetlands in the Colorado Mountains" |
Healthy streams and wetlands are becoming increasingly appreciated for their role in climate resilience, especially in the arid western US. In Colorado, stream and wetland restoration is an important component of local and statewide climate action plans. Historically, the restoration industry focused on stabilizing channels and engineering wetland systems, but for many of us the vision has turned towards natural solutions—towards restoring the processes that make streams and wetlands function the way they evolved. Process-based restoration. For most of the degraded streams and wetlands of the Rocky Mountains, restoring natural processes means restoring the keystone species. Castor canadensis. The North American beaver. As aquatic ecosystem engineers, North American beavers were foundational to the formation and maintenance of Colorado’s stream and wetland ecosystems. To a large degree, the evolving story about how these systems degenerated follows the story of humanity’s relationship with beavers—from coexistence to commodification to competition and conflict. Healthy streams and wetlands flourished while indigenous people coexisted with beavers; they degraded when beavers were commodified and nearly eradicated during the fur trade; and their health continued to decline when people began competing with beavers by developing former beaver meadows for ranching, farming, and other land uses. When beavers return, their efforts to restore healthy streams and wetlands to areas they once inhabited are often in conflict with imposed human land uses. The future of Colorado’s stream and wetland health (and of our resilience to a rapidly changing climate) may well depend on where this relationship is headed. Will we continue to treat nature’s aquatic ecosystem engineers as commodities, competitors, and conflicts? Do we really think human engineers can design and build functional and resilient stream and wetland ecosystems that work as well as the ones that evolved naturally over millions of years with beavers? Will we continue to try to control nature? Or will we learn to work with nature? Can we coexist with nature’s own stream and wetland engineers? Can we learn to collaborate with beavers by enabling them to do what they have done for eons. Will we let them help us to restore and maintain healthy stream and wetland ecosystems? This presentation explains why a few practitioners in the Colorado mountains have chosen to partner with beavers in the process-based restoration of our streams and wetlands for climate resilience. It shows, by example, the types of projects we are doing on the ground to promote this partnership. To us, partnership means sharing the burden. It’s not about just releasing beavers and expecting them to do all the work (as if they could!). And it is not about doing all the work ourselves by simply mimicking what beavers do (as if we could!). It’s about understanding what we can do to help the beavers help us. When it comes climate resilience in the Colorado Mountains, we and the beavers are in it together. |