Tell your state leaders to support beaver rewilding!

In 2023, California began relocating beavers (Castor canadensis) from the Sacramento and San Joaquin watersheds to return them to the lands of the Tule River and Mountain Maidu indigenous tribes. Now, researchers have found that the beavers’ return to the Tásmam Koyóm meadow north of the Sierra Nevada (especially their subsequent dam-building!) has reinvigorated the wetland ecosystem, bringing in new wildlife ranging from willow flycatchers to sandhill cranes while increasing water coverage by over 22%. This rewilding project is actively building landscape-scale resilience against wildfires and drought!

This is just one of many cases showing the benefits of beavers! American beavers are native to at least some parts of 49 U.S. states (all but Hawaii), and they’re natural hydrological engineers, with their dams and ponds stabilizing the water cycle and providing a multitude of valuable ecosystem services.

Letting beavers do their work is especially important as wildfires become more common. Not only do beaver dams keep more water in the area, but beavers chewing down the trees to build these dams acts as natural “fuel thinning” work, similar to that achieved by a prescribed burn, making it harder for fire to spread.

To take just one more example, when three giant wildfires struck Colorado in 2020, beaver-created wetlands provided wet “green refuges” across the state’s wildlands, and a study found that stretches of river with beaver dams consistently experienced a much lower burn intensity!

America’s beaver populations have bounced back substantially in recent decades after centuries of overhunting, but there’s still a lot more growth opportunity to be had and a lot more ecosystem services to gain. State leaders (everywhere except Hawaii) should actively support and accelerate the reintroduction of beavers to promote richer, safer landscapes!

Tell your state leaders to support beaver rewilding!