WATS 5620 - Beaver Dam Building Site Suitability Assessment
Take me to LTPBR Module 1
Corresponding LTPBR lectures and reading on beaver dam acitivty.
Take me to Canvas Assignment
Link to CEWA/WATS 5620 Canvas Assignment
Background
Across North America and Europe, there is interest in beaver relocation programs to translocate beaver from settings where they are a potential nuisance (e.g. irrigation canals) to places where they have could aid in low-tech process-based restoration. This is in recognition of the potential benefits of reestablishing beaver dam building activity as a key process in riverscapes where their populations have been diminished or extripated, and their is capacity to support them.
Assignment
In this assignment, we would like you to select two reaches of riverscapes:
- A reach you wish to translocate beaver to (hypothetically), that currently has no beaver activity
- A reach with beaver dam building activity and you survey the activity (remotely or hybrid field and desktop)
Please perform an assessment of:
-
The first site's suitability for translocation using your own BRAT capacity analysis (e.g., BRAT CIS Protocol - see here for PDF version of form). The capacity you are estimating is the upper limit of the number of dams per length of channel that could be supported in that riverscape based on the vegetation and hydrology. Your answer will be a bin of a range of dams per kilometer (e.g.
Frequent - 5 - 15 dams/km) for the length of reach you identify. To report this density as a capcity multiply your reach length by the dam density (e.g. for 5-15 dams/km for a 0.5 km reach would be capacity ~3-8 dams). -
Please perform an assessment of the first site's suitability for translocation using your own BRATLinks to an external site. analysis. Please perform a beaver dam activity survey of the second site. You can use sites you are familiar with (e.g., your backyard creek) or a place you have visited and have some knowledge of the site conditions. Or, you could use anywhere on aerial imagery where beaver can be and you can see their activity clearly.
Capacity is an uppper limit. So this is an estimate of the maximum number of dams that could be supported given the resources and conditions present. By contrast, when you count the number of beaver dams, that is an empirical measurement of the actual number of dams. The comparison of the two can give an idea of if the percentage of local capacity realized.
While we are showing you how to do this assessment within Riverscapes Studio (QRiS), you can do the same assessment filling out a paper form (PDF of BRAT CIS).
Also, the logic employed in both forms, is the underlying inference system and logic in the Beaver Restoration Assessment Tool (BRAT), which actually uses a fuzzy inference system. BRAT has been run with nationally available data for the entirety of CONUS and is avaialble for free in the Data Exchange. The forms can be most reliably filled out in the field, but can very reasonably be assessed from the desktop in many situations. The BRAT model can be run with higher resolution data, but can produce reasonable results even from nationally available data.
What to Turn In
You will submit a URL to a Post on our commmunity platform that has a little one or two sentence summary including something like:
For my assessment, I chose to assess the suitability of a xx km long reach on the such and such River in the something or other Watershed for beaver translocation. There was no beaver dam activity present, but I estimated the capacity to be between x and x dams (categorical label (e.g. frequent)).
I also inventoried a xx km long reach on the such and such River in the something or other Watershed for beaver dam building activity. I found xx beaver dams or a realized density of x dams/km (categorical label (e.g. frequent)).
Here is a link to my Riverscapes Studio Project: url in the Data Exchange.
Optionally, you can inlclude image(s) (e.g. maps or photos) of your site in your post.
Submit a URL in Canvas of your post and make sure your post has a publicly accessible and working link to your QRiS project for us on our Community Live Feed (just like you did for BDA exercise).
Tutorials
Please follow these instructions to perform this assessment in Riverscapes Studio (QRiS). To intall QRiS and QGIS, see here (make sure you do not install the latest version of QGIS, but instead the long-term stable release or earlier). You will submit a URL to your shared Riverscapes Studio project in the Data Exchange. We will discuss the process and challenges of beaver relocation in class.
QGIS is free and will work on a PC, Linux or Mac, but do not use the latest release. Instead install the long term release. There are bugs in the latest releases that prevent the QRiS plugin from working correctly on all machines.
It is possible to do this assignment without QRiS and just doing the mapping manually in Google Earth or Google Maps or similar and using the paper form. Even if you don't have any GIS experience, you can get started easily here.