Bringing Beavers Back to Coastal California
Bringing Beavers Back to Coastal California took place on Saturday May 18th, 2024. It was hosted by the Cal Poly Initiative for Climate Leadership and Resilience, with nonprofit partners SLO Beaver Brigade and the Morro Bay Open Space Alliance. The event featured 3 talks and 4 breakout sessions for over 100 hybrid attendees. Additional tours of local beaver habitat along Pismo Creek took place on May 19th. Learn more about the event below.
Event Description
This hybrid in-person and online seminar focused on the major role beavers can play in improving and maintaining ecosystem health if they are able to return to coastal watersheds in California. Featuring presentations from experts in the field as well as interactive discussions, this seminar aimed to inform community members living in coastal California as well as inspire students to research the potential role of beavers as a restoration tool and ally.
Event Sessions
“Creek Lands Conservation— Protecting and Conserving Small Coastal Watersheds of the Central Coast”
with Steph Wald, Watershed Projects Manager at Creek Lands Conservation
Steph talked about the health of creeks in coastal watersheds as relates to steelhead and CLC’s projects on watershed health, focusing on challenges and opportunities for resilience, rewilding for fish and wildlife, and increased public access for connecting people to their waterways.
"Process-Based Restoration: mimicking beavers to restore stream health”
with Cooper Lienhart, President of Nature’s Engineers
Beavers were stewards for the creeks in the Morro Bay Watershed for millions of years, maintaining lush wetland ecosystems, until they were hunted completely out of the area for their fur. Now, many of the streams flowing into Morro Bay are incised and degraded, supporting little water and life. Process-Based Restoration is the practice of giving an ecosystem the inputs it needs to restore its natural processes and build itself back up to health and self-sustainability over time. By building human-made Beaver Dam Analogs (BDAs) with mostly hand tools and human labor, streams have the structure and complexity they need to slow and hold water, store carbon, support more life, and rebuild the habitat for beavers to return.
“Lessons Learned and Replicable Strategies for Coexisting with and Bringing Back Beaver in California”
with Kate Lundquist & Brock Dolman - Co-Directors of Occidental Arts & Ecology Center WATER Institute
After more than 20 years of Occidental Arts & Ecology Center’s Bring Back the Beaver Campaign actively campaigning to change the way California approaches beaver restoration, they have recently achieved some huge successes. Kate and Brock shared some of the strategies and tactics that worked for them over these years to arrive at this exciting new beaver moment in California. They talked about their various educational efforts to address both the nativity of beaver in California and also share about the many benefits of beavers. They also addressed ideas for how to non-lethally coexist with beavers, provided updates on new State beaver policies, and discussed issues & opportunities for relocation.
