Ecologically, beavers dams and the pools they produce allow a healthy, vibrant riparian zone in areas they might not otherwise exist. And they hold runoff water at higher elevations for longer.

Clay Ramey, a fisheries #biologist with the White River National Forest, said that once the U.S. Forest Service knows where beavers already live and where they would improve the #ecosystem, they can relocate beavers to sites that make ecological sense.

“Beavers were native here. And so, before the gringos showed up and killed them all, there were beavers everywhere. And more or less every stream that’s less than something like 5% slope was just chock a block with #beaver dams. The animals adapted to that, and the plant communities adapted to that. And the water that came out of these #watersheds probably a lot slower than it did once we took all the #beavers out,” Ramey said.

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