Melinda Daniels, an associate professor of geography at Kansas Sate University hopes that those working to restore rivers will keep nature’s ecosystem engineers top of mind.

According to a recent story in U.S. News and World Report, beavers are often called “ecosystem engineers” because they can radically alter stream or valley bottom ecosystems.

Daniels has recently been studying the connection between beavers and river restoration. “Beaver dams create diverse river landscapes,” she says, “and can turn a single-thread channel stream into a meadow, pond or multichannel, free-flowing stream,” according to the article.

“Current restoration projects often don’t consider the role of beavers as ecosystem engineers, and instead focus on creating continuous free-flowing streams,” Daniels said. “Such restoration can be expensive because it usually involves completely tearing down small 19th-century milldams and re-engineering an entire valley bottom.”

Daniels and three researchers from the University of Connecticut have co-authored “The River Discontinuum: Applying Beaver Modifications to Baseline Conditions for Restoration of Forested Headwaters.” This article, led by Denise Burchsted at the University of Connecticut, appears in a recent issue of BioScience, the journal of the American Institute of Biological Sciences.

“The ultimate goal of the research,” Daniels said in the story, “is to help restore rivers in an efficient way that acknowledges ecosystem diversity and doesn’t destroy it.”  >Read More