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Beaver are an integral component of hydrologic, geomorphic, and biotic processes within North American stream systems, and their propensity to build dams alters stream and riparian structure and function to the benefit of many aquatic and terrestrial species. Recognizing this, beaver relocation efforts and/or application of structures designed to mimic the function of beaver dams are increasingly being utilized as effective and cost-efficient stream and riparian restoration approaches. Despite these verities, the notion that beaver dams negatively impact stream habitat remains common, specifically the assumption that beaver dams increase stream temperatures during summer to the detriment of sensitive biota such as salmonids. In this study, we tracked beaver dam distributions and monitored water temperature throughout 34 km of stream for an eight-year period between 2007 and 2014. During this time the number of natural beaver dams within the study area increased by an order of magnitude, and an additional 4 km of stream were subject to a restoration manipulation that included installing a high-density of Beaver Dam Analog (BDA) structures designed to mimic the function of natural beaver dams. Our observations reveal several mechanisms by which beaver dam development may influence stream temperature regimes; including longitudinal buffering of diel summer temperature extrema at the reach scale due to increased surface water storage, and creation of cool-water channel scale temperature refugia through enhanced groundwater-surface water connectivity. Our results suggest that creation of natural and/or artificial beaver dams could be used to mitigate the impact of human induced thermal degradation that may threaten sensitive species.

Beaver have been referred to as ecosystem engineers because of the large impacts their dam building activities have on the landscape; however, the benefits they may provide to fluvial fish species has been debated. We conducted a watershed-scale experiment to test how increasing beaver dam and colony persistence in a highly degraded incised stream affects the freshwater production of steelhead ( Oncorhynchus mykiss ). Following the installation of beaver dam analogs (BDAs), we observed significant increases in the density, survival and production of juvenile steelhead without impacting upstream and downstream migrations. The steelhead response occurred as the quantity and complexity of their habitat increased. This study is the first large-scale experiment to quantify the benefits of beavers and BDAs to a fish population and its habitat. Beaver mediated restoration may be a viable and efficient strategy to recover ecosystem function of previously incised streams and to increase the production of imperiled fish populations.

Side scan sonar in low-cost 'fishfinder' systems has become popular in aquatic ecology and sedimentology for imaging submerged riverbed sediment at coverages and resolutions sufficient to relate bed texture to grain-size. Traditional methods to map bed texture (i.e. physical samples) are relatively high-cost and low spatial coverage compared to sonar, which can continuously image several kilometers of channel in a few hours. Towards a goal of automating the classification of bed habitat features, we investigate relationships between substrates and statistical descriptors of bed textures in side scan sonar echograms of alluvial deposits. We develop a method for automated segmentation of bed textures into between two to five grain-size classes. Second-order texture statistics are used in conjunction with a Gaussian Mixture Model to classify the heterogeneous bed into small homogeneous patches of sand, gravel, and boulders with an average accuracy of 80%, 49%, and 61%, respectively. Reach-averaged proportions of these sediment types were within 3% compared to similar maps derived from multibeam sonar.

Adult salmonids are frequently observed building redds adjacent to in-channel structure, including boulders and large woody debris. These areas are thought to be preferentially selected for a variety of reasons, including energy and/or predation refugia for spawners, and increased hyporheic exchange for incubating embryos. This research sought to quantify in-channel structure effects on local hydraulics and hyporheic flow and provide a mechanistic link between these changes and the survival, development, and growth of Chinook salmon Oncorhynchus tshawytscha embryos. Data were collected in an eight-kilometer reach, on the regulated lower Mokelumne River, in the California Central Valley. Nine paired sites, consisting of an area containing in-channel structure paired with an adjacent area lacking in-channel structure, were evaluated. Results indicated that in-channel structure disrupts surface water velocity patterns, creating pressure differences that significantly increase vertical hydraulic gradients within the subsurface. Overall, in-channel structure did not significantly increase survival, development, and growth of Chinook salmon embryos. However, at several low gradient downstream sites containing in-channel structure, embryo survival, development, and growth were significantly higher relative to paired sites lacking such features. Preliminary data indicate that adding or maintaining in-channel structure, including woody material, in suboptimal spawning reaches improves the incubation environment for salmonid embryos in regulated reaches of a lowland stream. More research examining temporal variation and a full range of incubation depths is needed to further assess these findings.

Dam building by beaver (Castor spp.) slows water movement through montane valleys, increasing transient water storage and the diversity of residence times. In some cases, water storage created by beaver dam construction is correlated to changes in streamflow magnitude and timing. However, the total amount of additional surface and groundwater storage that beaver dams may create (and, thus, their maximum potential impact on streamflow) has not been contextualized in the water balance of larger river basins. We estimate the potential transient water storage increases that could be created at 5, 25, 50, and 100% of maximum modeled beaver dam capacity in the Bear River basin, USA, by adapting the height above nearest drainage (HAND) algorithm to spatially estimate surface water storage. Surface water storage estimates were combined with the MODFLOW groundwater model to estimate potential increases in groundwater storage throughout the basin. We tested four scenarios to estimate potential transient water storage increases resulting from the construction of 1179 to 34,897 beaver dams, and estimated surface water storage to range from 57.5 to 72.8 m3 per dam and groundwater storage to range from 182.2 to 313.3 m3 per dam. Overall, we estimate that beaver dam construction could increase transient water storage by up to 10.38 million m3 in the Bear River basin. We further contextualize beaver dam-related water storage increases with streamflow, reservoir, and snowpack volumes.

Biogenic features such as beaver dams, large wood, and live vegetation are essential to the maintenance of complex stream ecosystems, but these features are largely absent from models of how streams change over time. Many streams have incised because of changing climate or land-use practices. Because incised streams provide limited benefits to biota, they are a common focus of restoration efforts. Contemporary models of long-term change in streams are focused primarily on physical characteristics, and most restoration efforts are also focused on manipulating physical rather than ecological processes. We present an alternative view, that stream restoration is an ecosystem process, and suggest that the recovery of incised streams is largely dependent on the interaction of biogenic structures with physical fluvial processes. In particular, we propose that live vegetation and beaver dams or beaver dam analogues can substantially accelerate the recovery of incised streams and can help create and maintain complex fluvial ecosystems.

Beaver ponds are surface-water features that are transient through space and time. Such qualities complicate the inclusion of beaver ponds in local and regional water balances, and in hydrological models, as reliable estimates of surface-water storage are difficult to acquire without time- and labour-intensive topographic surveys. A simpler approach to overcome this challenge is needed, given the abundance of the beaver ponds in North America, Eurasia, and southern South America. We investigated whether simple morphometric characteristics derived from readily available aerial imagery or quickly measured field attributes of beaver ponds can be used to approximate surface-water storage among the range of environmental settings in which beaver ponds are found. Studied were a total of 40 beaver ponds from four different sites in North and South America. The simplified volume–area–depth (V–A–h) approach, originally developed for prairie potholes, was tested. With only two measurements of pond depth and corresponding surface area, this method estimated surface-water storage in beaver ponds within 5 % on average. Beaver pond morphometry was characterized by a median basin coefficient of 0.91, and dam length and pond surface area were strongly correlated with beaver pond storage capacity, regardless of geographic setting. These attributes provide a means for coarsely estimating surface-water storage capacity in beaver ponds. Overall, this research demonstrates that reliable estimates of surface-water storage in beaver ponds only requires simple measurements derived from aerial imagery and/or brief visits to the field. Future research efforts should be directed at incorporating these simple methods into both broader beaver-related tools and catchment-scale hydrological models.

Environmental stressors associated with human land and water-use activities have degraded many riparian ecosystems across the western United States. These stressors include (i) the widespread expansion of invasive plant species that displace native vegetation and exacerbate streamflow and sediment regime alteration; (ii) agricultural and urban development in valley bottoms that decouple streams and rivers from their floodplains and reduce instream wood recruitment and retention; and (iii) flow modification that reduces water quantity and quality, degrading aquatic habitats. Here we apply a novel drainage network model to assess the impacts of multiple stressors on reach-scale riparian condition across two large U.S. regions. In this application, we performed a riparian condition assessment evaluating three dominant stressors: (1) riparian vegetation departure from historical condition; (2) land-use intensity within valley bottoms; and (3) floodplain fragmentation caused by infrastructure within valley bottoms, combining these stressors in a fuzzy inference system. We used freely available, geospatial data to estimate reach-scale (500 m) riparian condition for 52,800 km of perennial streams and rivers, 25,600 km in Utah, and 27,200 km in 12 watersheds of the interior Columbia River Basin (CRB). Model outputs showed that riparian condition has been at least moderately impaired across ≈70% of the streams and rivers in Utah and ≈49% in the CRB. We found 84% agreement (Cohen’s ĸ = 0.79) between modeled reaches and field plots, indicating that modeled riparian condition reasonably approximates on-the-ground conditions. Our approach to assessing riparian condition can be used to prioritize watershed-scale floodplain conservation and restoration by providing network-scale data on the extent and severity of riparian degradation. The approach that we applied here is flexible and can be expanded to run with additional riparian stressor data and/or finer resolution input data.

Eurasian beaver (Castor fiber) populations are expanding across Europe. Depending on location, beaver dams bring multiple benefits and/or require management. Using nationally available data, we developed: a Beaver Forage Index (BFI), identifying beaver foraging habitat, and a Beaver Dam Capacity (BDC) model, classifying suitability of river reaches for dam construction, to estimate location and number of dams at catchment scales. Models were executed across three catchments, in Great Britain (GB), containing beaver. An area of 6747 km2 was analysed for BFI and 16,739 km of stream for BDC. Field surveys identified 258 km of channel containing beaver activity and 89 dams, providing data to test predictions. Models were evaluated using a categorical binomial Bayesian framework to calculate probability of foraging and dam construction. BFI and BDC models successfully categorised the use of reaches for foraging and damming, with higher scoring reaches being preferred. Highest scoring categories were ca. 31 and 79 times more likely to be used than the lowest for foraging and damming respectively. Zero-inflated negative binomial regression showed that modelled dam capacity was significantly related (p = 0.01) to observed damming and was used to predict numbers of dams that may occur. Estimated densities of dams, averaged across each catchment, ranged from 0.4 to 1.6 dams/km, though local densities may be up to 30 dams/km. These models provide fundamental information describing the distribution of beaver foraging habitat, where dams may be constructed and how many may occur. This supports the development of policy and management concerning the reintroduction and recolonisation of beaver.

We quantified all components of a fluvial sediment budget for a discrete flood on an aggrading gravel bed river. Bed load transport rates were measured at the upstream and downstream ends of a 4 km study area on the Provo River, Utah, during a dam‐controlled flood. We also collected high‐resolution measurements of channel topography before and after the controlled flood for the entire reach. Topographic uncertainty in the digital elevation models (DEM) was characterized using a spatially variable approach. The net sediment flux provided unambiguous indication of storage. Sediment input to the reach (319 m3) exceeded output (32 m3), producing a net accumulation of approximately 290 m3. The difference between the scour and fill was also positive (470 m3), but uncertainty in the topographic differencing was larger than the observed net storage. Thus, the budget would have been indeterminate if based on morphologic data alone. Although topographic differencing was not sufficiently accurate to indicate net storage, it was able to demonstrate that internal erosion was a larger sediment source than the net sediment flux. The magnitude of total erosion (1454 m3) and deposition (1926 m3) was considerably larger than net change in storage, showing that internal sources and sinks were the dominant driver of channel change. The findings provide guidance for the development of sediment budgets in settings in which one must choose between a morphological approach and the direct measurement of sediment flux. Key Points Estimates of sediment flux and topographic change demonstrate net aggradation Budget would be indeterminate if developed using morphological data only Channel change was primarily driven by local redistribution of sediment