In October this year, Karen Pope, an aquatic ecologist with the USDA Forest Service’s Pacific Southwest Research Station helped launch the California Process Based Restoration Network on the Plumas National Forest.
The network aims to recover degraded meadows and stream catchments by removing barriers to physical and biological processes. The approach harnesses the system’s fluvial and biological energy to do most of the restoration work.
Workshop participants showed it was possible to mimic beavers by building beaver dam analogs to slow and spread the water flowing through the incised channel of Clarks Creek Meadow.
Pope’s mission is to bring natural resource professionals together to promote and advance process-based restoration in California. “Meadows are some of the most productive ecosystems on the planet. They hold and store water, absorb carbon and provide wildlife habitat. And these are just a few benefits that healthy meadows provide,” Pope said.
Pope and PSW colleague Adam Cummings estimate that historically three times as many meadows existed compared to today. Mining, grazing, fire suppression and other land uses degraded meadows or eliminated them altogether.
Plumas National Forest hosted the network as participants applied the restoration approach to field training. Federal and state agencies, nonprofits and others gathered for four days in Plumas for the Build Like a Beaver training.
“People could bounce ideas off one another and ask questions. It made them feel part of a community. If they needed help, chances were that someone could provide guidance,” Pope said.
Fifty participants spent the first day touring beaver habitat to understand how the species create complex aquatic habitat. These habitats support endangered birds and amphibians, such as willow flycatchers and Cascades frogs, while also creating natural fire breaks.
“We told them meadows are building blocks of ecosystems, providing a breeding ground for aquatic insects that amphibians, like the Cascades frog and Sierran chorus frog feed on. In turn, frogs are hefty protein packets for birds and larger animals, so you have this interconnected food web,” Pope said.
In the training, participants learned how to assess meadow conditions and integrate beaver dam-like structures in restoration designs from experts from Swift Water Design, Symbiotic Restoration, Upstream and Anabranch Solutions. The structures help connect floodplains and promote biological regeneration in disconnected and degraded reaches.
Applying what they learned, participants planned where to build beaver dam analogs. Once they knew where to place the structures, they immersed themselves in the stream channel to build them.
Layering conifer boughs with mud and rock, they created beaver dam analogs at Clarks Creek Meadow. Made with materials found on-site, the man-made beaver dams helped plug up incised streams and creeks to spread water and create wetlands.
Information provided by Pacific Southwest Research Station
