Investigating beaver wetlands as ecosystem controls on river water quality

Project lead: Sam Pierce 

Beavers are powerful ecosystem engineers that reshape how water moves through landscapes. By building dams and excavating canals, they slow streams, reconnect floodplains, and create wetlands that transform hydrologic flow paths. These changes generate steep chemical and redox gradients that fundamentally alter how solutes repartition in watersheds. Despite growing interest in beaver-based restoration for building climate change resiliency, the implications for water quality remain poorly understood. Our research examines how beaver-engineered wetlands regulate the transport and transformation of metals, carbon, and other solutes in mountain headwater systems. We investigate when these wetlands act as sources or sinks for contaminants, how nanoscale mineral and organic associations control solute mobility, and how subsurface flow paths linking surface water and groundwater drive chemical exchange across floodplains. 

To address these questions, we combine field measurements in beaver-impacted watersheds of Colorado’s Rocky Mountains with laboratory-based geochemical and nanoscale analyses. High-frequency hydrologic monitoring, water chemistry measurements, and particle-scale characterization allow us to track how water moves through beaver wetlands and how its chemistry evolves along these flow paths 

Beaver wetlands provide an exceptional laboratory for understanding the tight coupling between hydrology and water quality. As beavers recolonize rivers across North America and Europe, their engineering activity may reshape the transport of nutrients and contaminants at watershed to continental scales, offering new insight into both the future and historical legacy of river chemistry. 

Previous Interns: 

Willow Hoins (University of Washington & Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory - Undergraduate student, 2024)