Busy beavers: Partnering with nature to restore lost meadows
image: Build Like a Beaver workshop participants check out a beaver lodge and beaver dams along Gurnsey Creek to see how these ecosystem engineers create hydrological complexity to support a wide diversity of plants and animals.
Credit: Karen Pope, USDA Forest Service
“Meadows are some of the most productive ecosystems on the planet. They hold and store water, absorb carbon and provide wildlife habitat. And these are just a few benefits that healthy meadows provide,” Pope said.
Pope and PSW colleague Adam Cummings estimate that historically more than three times as many meadows existed as do today. But mining, grazing, fire suppression and other land uses degraded meadows, and in some cases, eliminated them altogether.
To address this daunting challenge, Pope helped launch the California Process Based Restoration Network, with a mission to bring natural resource professionals together to promote and advance process-based restoration in California.
The network partners with nature to recover degraded meadows and stream catchments by removing barriers to physical and biological processes. This approach harnesses the system’s fluvial and biological energy to do most of the restoration ‘work.’
And in October 2024, thanks to Plumas National Forest’s willingness to host, the network applied this approach to training in the field. Federal and state agencies, nonprofits, and others gathered for four days in Plumas for the Build Like a Beaver training. And their excitement was palpable.
“People could bounce ideas off one another and ask questions. It made them feel part of a community. If they needed help, chances were someone could provide guidance,” Pope said.
Fifty participants spent the first day touring beaver habitat to see how the true experts create complex aquatic wonderlands. These ‘wonderlands’ support endangered birds, such as Willow flycatchers and amphibians like Cascades frogs, while also creating natural fire breaks.
“We told them how meadows are building blocks of ecosystems, providing a breeding ground for aquatic insects that amphibians, like the Cascades frog and Sierran chorus frog feed on. In turn, frogs are hefty protein packets for birds and larger animals, so you have this interconnected food web,” Pope said.
In the training, participants learned from experts at Swift Water Design, Symbiotic Restoration, Upstream, and Anabranch Solutions on how to assess meadow conditions and integrate beaver dam-like structures in restoration designs. These structures help connect floodplains and promote biological regeneration in disconnected and degraded reaches.
Applying what they learned, participants planned where to build beaver dam analogs. And once they knew where to place the structures, they immersed themselves in the stream channel to build them.
Layering conifer boughs with mud and rock, they created beaver dam analogs in Plumas’ Clarks Creek Meadow. These structures, made with materials found on-site, helped plug up incised streams and creeks to spread water and create wetlands.
In the evenings, they got to share these experiences, while savoring professionally cooked meals. Some gave lightning talks and swapped stories about beavers and regeneration under stars that enlivened dark skies on cool and clear nights. And on one evening, a rare aurora borealis light display shimmered in the sky, awing participants.
One participant, Suzanne Husky fondly remembers that experience and was impressed with the training, especially where she and others got to act like beavers. Husky, who originally hails from France, is sharing the importance of regenerating meadows through storytelling. She and philosopher, Baptiste Morizot recently published a book in French that highlights stream regeneration, helping people understand rivers and water through deep time.
“Baptiste, a philosopher of the living, takes us on a profound journey to understand stream health, among other things. And I used watercolors to illustrate stream health, the water cycle with beavers, and alliances with the beaver people” Husky said.
The impetus for the book started with Husky’s research on how folktales inform a culture about the agency of other beings in the world. She found that in North America beavers often took center stage. But in European folktales, beavers were largely absent, and she wondered why.
“In our book, we wanted to help overcome many centuries of French environmental amnesia and a lack of landscape knowledge. Until recently, many scientists were unaware of beavers’ ability to transform the face of a stream,” Husky emphasized.
Pope is thrilled that Husky and Morizot are using art and philosophy to reach a broad audience on why regenerating meadows matters and why they should care.
“Storytelling is a powerful tool that can help emotionally connect the public to meadow restoration in a way that a scientific paper may not,” Pope said.
Husky and Morizot are having their book translated into English, which will help them reach a broader audience. They hope those who read it will come away with a better understanding of regenerating streams and wetlands and why that work is important. They also want it to help people form robust alliances with those who are experts at it—beavers.
“Restoring meadows in France is really challenging, because our channel incisions are so deep and so old with our history that dates back much later than that of the United States. But Karen inspires me. When I tell her ‘I don’t know if we can do it,’ she says, ‘Suzanne, you have to try.’”