iBeaver: Crowd-sourcing data on North America’s Busy Beaver

Help us gather data with a new app! 

Beaver are the classic keystone species and ecosystem engineers. Their dams can alter landscapes in positive ways by creating, enhancing and maintaining wetland and riparian habitats for an array of species such as fishes, amphibians, reptiles, mammals, waterfowl, shorebirds, songbirds, plants and invertebrates. These wetlands also provide important ecological services that benefit humans, like groundwater filtration, carbon sequestration and flood attenuation. 

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Aaron Hall

Despite their critical role, beaver experienced massive population declines because of intensive trapping in the 18th and 19th centuries. Since then, beaver populations have rebounded in many U.S. rivers and streams, but they still haven’t re-inhabited their full historical range or are not present at the density that they were prior to trapping. There are lots of efforts currently working toward increasing our understanding of beaver distribution, but they are mostly specific to a certain region or project. Because of this, we saw an opportunity to develop a broader data collection app that could be used by almost any group or individual interested in beaver across the country. We then aimed to make the data publicly available. 

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Chris Canipe

As beavers continue to recover and their populations to grow and expand, it is critical for scientists, agencies and landowners to understand where beaver are currently found (or not found), where areas of suitable, uninhabited beaver habitat are located, where habitat restoration is needed and how beaver interact with the landscape (for example, by building dams and felling trees). Currently, we don’t have a lot of data to give us this information. This means, at a minimum, we can’t yet make meaningful comparisons of the species’ current status/distribution to its historical distribution, nor can we identify key habitat to protect or restore for beavers as they continue to expand back into their historic range.

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data from IUCN; map CC-BY Defenders of Wildlife 2021

Beavers have certainly come into ‘fashion’ recently as people have remembered or re-learned the important role they play as “ecosystem engineers.” At a coarse scale, we have a good idea of where beaver are present or absent. But at more refined scales, like a local watershed, national forest or local municipality, it’s hard to really say what streams or parts of streams currently have beaver and which do not. And despite the fact that there are some other efforts working towards increasing our understanding of beaver distribution, none of them are made for collecting publicly available data on beaver across the country. 

Defenders’ Center for Conservation Innovation (CCI) specializes in finding innovative applications of science, technology and policy for advancing wildlife conservation. So naturally, a collaboration between CCI’s mapping team and our beaver experts in our field conservation department seemed like a great place to start developing a nationwide beaver data collection tool. Our team decided to use Esri’s Survey123 platform to create iBeaver, a data collection tool that can record the location of a user’s observation and then prompt them to answer a series of survey-style questions to gather more information. This survey is relatively straightforward for the user, regardless of experience or skill level, with explanations and visuals to clarify what a user should be looking for. Over time, the information collected will fill in the knowledge gap of where beaver are, where there is and is not good beaver habitat and where there are beaver-human conflicts on the landscape that might need resolution.