Working with Beavers Website
Working with Beavers is a website we created in partnership with The Miistakis Institute to promote beaver knowledge and coexistence tools in Alberta. It is increasingly recognized that nature-based solutions have a higher resilience to changing climates than traditional grey engineering approaches. One such nature-based solution is promoting beavers for watershed health. It is well understood that beaver attenuate flood peaks, store water during droughts, support later season release of flows and dramatically improve water quality and quantity by slowing water and trapping sediment. Beavers help stabilize the landscape against the increased variability of drought and flood conditions. They also create critical habitat for both wildlife and fish populations.
Beneficial Management Practices
Beaver Beneficial Management Practices (BMPs) are practices that reduce or remove risks of human-beaver conflicts associated with the management of beavers. Often a combination of strategies may be beneficial to address a particular issue or concern. The purpose of the Alberta Beaver BMPs is to provide information about available beaver management tools with the goal of improving implementation of beaver coexistence tools in Alberta. By improving human-beaver coexistence, challenges can be mitigated while still maintaining beavers on the landscape, supporting watershed and ecological health and the ecosystem services they provide.
An interactive decision tree was created to accompany the BMPs to aid the decision-making process for how best to address the beaver issue at hand. The tree prompts yes/no answers to a series of questions that guides the user to consider both reactive and proactive management approaches that include coexistence tool options.
Interactive Decision Tree
Beaver Our Watershed Partner
If we want to understand them, recognize their role in our watersheds and figure out how to live with them, a good starting point would be to educate ourselves on their ecology, life history and the connections to watersheds. Then we might be better able to grasp the issues, challenges, the options and alternatives, and the future possibilities of living with beaver. Learn more about the benefits of beavers in the beaver edition of Caring For The Green Zone.
Learn MoreBeaver Fact Sheets
A Pond of Gold. Storing Water Naturally
Many people believe that water will be the new gold of the future. As the reality of climate change becomes ever more apparent, we will need to catch and store water more effectively. We’ve given water lots of advice, in the form of expensive dams and big reservoirs but is that always the best solution? Likely not. Have we overlooked a natural ally in our efforts to conserve and manage water? Yes, consider the beaver!
Decision Matrix Tool for Beaver Management
This beaver management decision matrix tool, developed for agricultural producers, provides a host of potential actions to respond to various concerns and opportunities that producers have, related to beavers on their land. Beavers can pose management challenges, but also offer many potential benefits to agricultural operations and to ecosystems
Beaver Coexistence Tools
This fact sheet was created in partnership with the Miistakis Institute as part of the “Working with Beavers” project and is intended to provide a broad summary of solutions that can help mitigate issues caused by beavers and foster an environment of human-wildlife coexistence
Cost-Benefit Analysis of Beaver Coexistence Tools
This fact sheet was created in partnership with the Miistakis Institute as part of the “Working with Beavers” project & features a cost-benefit analysis of beaver coexistence tools such as tree wrapping, pond levellers, & culvert protectors
Beaver Coexistence Tools – Materials & Suppliers
This fact sheet was created in partnership with the Miistakis Institute as part of the “Working with Beavers” project & features detailed information about the materials needed to complete beaver coexistence projects
Beavers and Fish
This fact sheet was created in partnership with the Miistakis Institute as part of the “Working with Beavers” project & outlines the general relationship between beavers and fish
∼ Words from a researcher, featured on the Beavers from Space website“Working with beavers will make our watersheds more resilient to flood, drought, wildfires, and other risks associated with climate change”
Beavers From Space
Despite the cultural and ecological importance of ksisskstaki (beaver) little is known about their presence in Alberta’s streams and rivers. By searching through satellite imagery for beaver dams and lodges in the waterways of the Kainai Nation (Blood Tribe) in southern Alberta, Beavers from Space seeks to determine where beaver are present on the landscape and where they are not. This information will inform riparian (river ecosystem) restoration locations, focusing on areas that beaver could be present (good habitat) but are absent.
The importance beaver is evident, but they need our help as much as we need theirs! By locating dams on satellite imagery you can help us determine where beaver are currently present (and absent) so we can select the best sites for beaver dam analogue stream restoration
This work is graciously supported by the Calgary Foundation, Alberta Innovates, the Alberta Ecotrust Foundation, and the Government of Alberta’s Watershed Resiliency and Restoration Program
