METHOW
BEAVER
PROJECT

Storing water for the future
one beaver at a time

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Methow Beaver Project provides solutions to support landowners, restoration professionals and educators in understanding the benefits of beavers and the importance of coexistence with beavers for our ecosystem, for our wildlife, for our community, for us.

WATERSHED RESTORATION

Beavers increase water storage, biodiversity, drought and wildfire resilience, and water quality. Learn how we're partnering with them to restore degraded streams in our watersheds.

BEAVER COEXISTENCE

Are you a landowner looking for assistance living with beavers? Explore our coexistence solutions and allow us to help you find a win-win solution to conflicts with beavers.

EDUCATION AND OUTREACH

Learn about our pre-k through graduate-student education programs, public outreach events, and workshops and trainings for restoration professionals.

BEAVER
RELOCATION

We relocate beavers from situations of irreconcilable conflict with humans to our riparian restoration sites where they become important partners in watershed restoration.

BEAVER
POLICY

We help to define the need for management policies that conserve healthy beaver populations and support greater use of beaver restoration as a landscape-scale restoration tool to repair degraded river systems.

WHY BEAVERS? WHY NOW?

Beavers once shaped North American rivers and streams with their damming behavior. It was once a much more watery world. Beavers engineering of aquatic systems was labyrinthian in complexity and harbored nearly unimaginable biodiversity and productivity. That productivity was rooted in the extensive riparian habitat, or transitional nutrient exchange areas between aquatic and terrestrial environments, that beavers are naturally inclined to create, expand and enhance through dam building. Riparian areas are estimated to have covered 40-50% of the landscape prior to European settlement, however today they represent less than 2% of the western US.

The loss of riparian as well as wetland habitat in the Methow River watershed occurred historically from the over-trapping of beavers for their fur, but the loss continues today. Land use change and development, intense extraction of resources, and overgrazing by domestic livestock along rivers and streams has reduced stream channel complexity and led to the degradation and loss of habitat quality and abundance. Riparian habitat continues to be impacted today by continued human activities, large wildfires and subsequent erosion, and changing patterns of precipitation and temperature due to climate change.

Once thought to create issues and hazards, the beaver’s natural behaviors are now understood to provide dramatic benefits to the land and water, which is why their presence on both public and private lands is a low-cost, low-impact service to citizenry and wildlife.

 

OUR KEY FUNDING PARTNERS