Beavers as Bioengineers: A Guidebook on Stream Restoration in Manitoba - Download Link and Preview

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Beavers as Bio-Engineers, A Guidebook to Creek Restoration in Manitoba.pdf

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Excerpt From "Beavers as Bio-Engineers: A Guidebook to Creek Restoration in Manitoba

Section One – Introduction

This project aims to be applicable and accessible to people everywhere, not just environmentalists. Primarily, this guide is made for interested landowners who want to increase the health of water ecosystems on their property. The addition of water being held back on land increases the biodiversity, resilience, and diversity of a property (“The Beaver Restoration Guidebook: Working With Beaver to Restore Streams, Wetlands, and Floodplains,” 2018) Likewise, groups of watershed district members, indigenous communities, and more can use this guide in the implementation of their work.

The main purpose of this guide is to be an accessible, easy-to-use booklet that the general population can understand, using content from indigenous knowledge in combination with Western science. This combination makes it more highly applicable to the ecosystems of Manitoba and is meant to be easily understood.

The State of Southern Manitoba’s Ecosystems

Manitobans are facing an increasingly hostile landscape, with problems such as water insecurity and unpredictable weather being listed as major concerns (IISD & Runnalls, 2007). Along with that, with the growing loss of wetlands and pothole lakes, excess water drainage infrastructure, and lack of water absorption, local ecosystems are becoming more unstable (Scott, 2024). With the loss of these key water systems, the landscape will become dryer and much more vulnerable to drought (Scott, 2024)

Climate change predictions are also showing an increasingly dire situation. Heat is set to increase during the summers and coupled with a higher frequency of very hot summers and more severe weather predictions, both agriculture and the health of our local ecosystems are likely to take a hit (Blair et al., n.d.). More precisely, experts are calling for more extreme droughts, more extreme storms, heightened flooding, and more high highs in temperatures (Blair et al., n.d.).

Within this picture is the growing population of beavers. Since being historically overhunted across the world due to their valuable furs, meat, and oils, beaver numbers are now making a comeback. There are growing conflicts between beavers and humans, with issues resulting from lack of management like flooding and damage to infrastructure. Beavers tend to build dams in any waterway they can find, be that in a ditch or a stream, resulting in f looding in areas used by people. When unmanaged, beaver dams tend to break down and cause large flooding events in the spring. Northern Manitoba is experiencing issues related to this, with areas within the Intermountain Watershed District being a prime example. Beavers are expanding out of the Duck Mountain and Riding Mountain parks into the watershed district, plugging culverts and flooding farmland (Hulley; McNabb, 2024). With the end of the beaver bounty in the area paying people to kill beavers, there is an increased need for new management practices. Fortunately, there are practices out there that are straightforward and easy to apply to Manitoban situations.

Guidebook Overview

Within this guidebook, we will discuss the major topics to enable landowners to introduce beavers into a waterway. Firstly, we will cover beaver ecology from both a Western scientific and Ojibwe ecological perspective to provide important background information. Along with that, we will go into detail about indigenous environmental knowledge to better understand traditional management practices used in this guide. Following that, there are several pre-requirements before putting into action a restoration project on the land. This includes briefly checking for any legal conflicts with waterway legislation in Manitoba and 5 getting landowners prepared for managing a population of beavers. Site assessment implementation and maintenance information will be covered in detail. Finally, frequently encountered situations will be covered, along with an example project and detail regarding the site.

Call to Action

Deteriorating environmental quality affects everyone, from rural communities to urban environments. As climate change advances, we will see an increasingly hard landscape to farm, raising the costs of necessities like food, water, and shelter. On the opposite end, with a healthier environment through water being held on the landscape by restoration of waterways, everyone benefits in the long term. Preventing water drainage and increasing water retention in the soil is essential if we are to improve our situation (Scott, 2024).

Along with that, beaver populations are growing (“The Beaver Restoration Guidebook: Working With Beaver to Restore Streams, Wetlands, and Floodplains,” 2018). With our current management practices, more and more conflicts involving beavers will happen. However, with the proper actions, we can learn to avoid conflicts and live alongside these beneficial animals. Manitoba is in a unique position on the prairies to head this change due to the involvement of indigenous communities and local hydrology. Historically, the prairies here were managed by the indigenous peoples of the area. This included practices such as controlled burns, wildlife population management through hunting, and the creation of ecosystems that are beneficial to both people and animals, the latter involving traditional management of beavers (Scott, 2024).

It is this holistic management that is what this guide seeks to bring back– the traditional practices of the Manitoba Ojibwe, combined with modern Western scientific expertise and data on the subject. Together with these two knowledge practices, we can create a Manitoba that is more resilient to weather climate change and a better future for those coming after us.