​Joe delivered a Science Unwrapped talk on September 11, 2015 to a Logan Audience & on September 24, 2015 to a Park City Audience at Swanner EcoCenter.

The Logan presentation was recorded and will be posted eventually to Science Unwrapped's Website.

PDFs of the slides are available here:

•  Logan Slides
•   Park City Slides

A video of the Logan Version of the talk can be found here:

If you want just to watch the video that was shown during the presentation, see here:

See the our Beaver Workshop pages for more information.

Originally posted Sep 3, 2015, 2:12 PM by Joe Wheaton

Utah State University has made 2015 the Year of Water, and our research on beaver are a big part of that. Jeremy Jensen did a fantastic job of highlighting some of ET-AL's research with respect to beaver.joewheaton.org:

Originally posted Aug 4, 2015, 11:34 AM by Joe Wheaton

Using Beaver as a Wetland Restoration Tool: Restoration Lessons Learned and an Introduction to the Beaver Restoration Assessment Tool

The Association of State Wetland Managers (ASWM) will host this webinar on July 29, 2015, at 3:00 PM EST

Webinar Description:  This webinar will introduce the topic of using beaver to assist in wetland restoration.  The webinar will serve a national webinar, but focus on examples in the arid western states.  The presentation will cover the historical role of beaver in maintaining water resources, how the loss of beaver has affect these resources and how their reintroduction can provide a range of ecosystem services, including the restoration of wetlands and their associated benefits.  However, the introduction of beaver has been found be complicated in many locations and for many reasons.  The second half of the 
presentation will share about the importance of careful site selection and the Beaver Restoration  Assessment Tool (BRAT), a tool developed at Utah State University to assess potential locations for beaver reintroduction using science-based siting variables.  

Register here

On February 9th, 2015, Joe will give a talk to the Utah Geological Association as part of their luncheon series titled 'The many hats of beaver: Ecosystem Engineer, Geologic Agent and Restoration Practitioner'. 


Abstract:
North American beaver (Castor canadensis) were once trapped to near extinction for their pelts, which made fashionable top hats. Fortunately, for beaver and us, though extirpated in many areas top hats went out of fashion. Beaver populations are now recovering and we increasingly recognize their value as ecosystem engineers. Specifically, their dam building activities cause a cascade of hydrologic, geomorphic and ecological feedbacks that in-turn are critical to creating and sustaining complex, healthy habitat in rivers, streams and wetlands for a diverse range of flora and fauna. This recognition has elevated their status to a restoration practitioner in many parts of the country, including here in Utah, where beaver are actively used to help restore streams. From a geologic perspective, beaver excavate modest amounts of sediment to pack into their dams, but their dams and associated wetlands, floodplains and overfllow channels are sinks for massive quantities of sediment. In fact, in many of Utah's headwater streams (e.g. first to third order), the presence of valley bottoms is difficult to explain without the presence of beaver over the Holocene. That is, in what would otherwise be confined valleys, layers upon, layers of relic beaver dams filled in with sediment have raised up the valley floor. These beaver-pond and floodplain deposits do not have the same characteristics of traditional floodplains, and tend to exhibit a stepped morphology longitudinally, representing the forced nature of the flooding (i.e. forced by dams).  We have taken advantage of these characteristics in incised channels and are using beaver to aggrade degraded systems and restore such channels. A mix of stories and anecdotes will be shared about the many hats of beaver, as well as some data and findings from some of our ongoing research into beaver and the profound geomorphic impact they have.

Here's a link to the talk, "What Can Beaver Teach Us About Adapting to Climate Change and Building More Resilient Systems? "

The interest in the applied aspects of our lab's work on beaver has been getting lots of interest as of late. On August 4th, Joe did an interview with Nick Burns on KRCL (90.9 FM)'s RadioActive all about Beavers: Nature's Engineer. Listen to the interview here.

Earlier this summer, colleagues Brain Greene from USU Water Watch, Nick Bouwes (Eco Logical Research), Wally MacFarlane(USU ETAL), Martha Jensen (USU ETAL) and Joe all did a field visit up Logan Canyon with KCPW producer Ross Chambless. Ross put together a radio segment   based on the visit that aired July 13th, 2014 on 'Beaver Dam Mapping App Now Available for Citizen Scientists' . 

The Chambless Explore Utah Science interview talks partly about a Beaver Monitoring App that is hosted by USU Water Watch, and partly about BRAT - the Beaver Restoration Assessment Tool. For more information, also see http://beaver.joewheaton.org.