Utah Issues
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Volunteer with the Grand Canyon Trust and help us extend our reach and positive influence on the ground.
We need your help with gathering browse data, documenting grazing impacts, and conducting beaver habitat surveys, biological inventories and springs assessments.
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Utah forests need beaver, their chief water engineer, back — because dams change everything.
Riparian areas host the greatest biodiversity of any habitat in the West (with aspen communities second), and wetlands are one of the most imperiled. The contribution of beaver is priceless; their dams...
- Expand riparian areas and make ponds and wetlands.
- Slow water, allowing it recharge groundwater rather than become runoff.
- Reduce the gouging, erosive power of floods, especially if they occur in series.
- Trap sediment to repair damaged, incised creek channels.
- Extend and increase late summer flows by slowing water.
- Create habitat for frogs, salamanders, fish, ducks, and cavity-nesting birds.
- Create habitat for the vast majority of forests species.
These benefits are particularly important in light of expected consequences of climate change in the Southwest, including higher temperatures, reduced snowpack, earlier water runoff, and potentially heavier flooding events. Currently, beaver are active in only a fraction of their potential habitat for several reasons:
- They have been subjected to unlimited recreational trapping.
- People don’t frequently understand the beneficial roles of beaver or fear that they “steal” water.
- People are unaware of simple, time-tested, nonlethal means of responding to situations in which the beaver’s genius at building dams can be transformed from “nuisance” to “benefit.”
Good news!
Beaver on the national forests of Utah have just been given a big boost: In January 2010, the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources adopted its first-ever beaver management plan. The plan emphasizes non-lethal responses to beaver in “nuisance” settings, live-trapping of beaver that must be moved, and transport of live-trapped beaver to streams identified for beaver restoration.
Your donations and membership dues make our research, monitoring, and restoration work in Utah possible.
