Beavers Benefit Stream Management and Restoration
By Lynnette Harris and Phaedra Budy
B
eavers are ecosystem engineers, and
important to many arid western ecosys-
tems. Beavers are considered a keystone
species, meaning they have an outsized effect on
their environment even when their physical size and numbers are not large. However, they are not always welcomed or well understood.
USU graduate students Marshall Wolf and
Karen Bartelt work with Associate Professor Phaedra Budy to better understand how the construction
and eventual collapse of beaver dams influence the ecology of floodplains on Utah’s public land. In
addition, Budy is involved in work examining how beaver fare after being relocated from an area in
which they were considered a nuisance. Relocated beaver are tagged with transmitters so their activi-
ties and range can be tracked in their new habitat. Beaver can play important roles in stream restoration
that aids plant and fish communities, but little has
been documented about whether relocated animals are as effective as beaver that occur naturally in a restoration area.
Through the summer of 2019, Bartelt and Wolf
hade used drones to collect high-resolution aerial images of more than 75 beaver complexes. Data
processing procedures are helping them evaluate
the images and quantify the ecological and geologi-
cal changes associated with those beaver complex-
es. What they learn will help natural resource managers better understand how beaver are influencing productivity, fish habitat quality, and floodplain Photos courtesy of Phaedra Budy.
12 Utah Science
connectivity of Utah’s rivers and streams. ¤
