Mark Beardsley

EcoMetrics

Beaver restoration opportunities assessment

Beaver restoration opportunities assessment

This study outlines a pragmatic professional-judgment assessment of the potential for using low-tech process-based restoration (LTPBR) approaches for restoring riverscapes with beavers in Park County, Colorado. The method allows professionals to apply knowledge and data from many sources in the evaluation of current beaver activity, capacity, limit...

This paper presents a new way of thinking about stream restoration as an ecological healing process, rather than as an engineering design-build exercise. We present an operational definition of ecological health for application to streams and show how it can be applied as the diagnosis, treatment, and ongoing care of impaired stream ecosystems. O...

This paper is intended to reinvigorate a discussion of ethics and incorporation of ethical thought into stream management plans and decision-making. I begin with the apparent dilemma of whether we manage streams for human desires versus stream ecosystem health. I then introduce concepts from contemporary environmental ethics including natural value...

Stage-0 Restoration using light touch treatments and working with beavers.

The importance of biological drivers in stream restoration. Examples of process-based restoration on beaver-mediated streams in the Rocky Mountain headwaters.

We explored the concepts of equilibrium and stability and their role in stream assessment and restoration. The Natural Equilibrium Paradigm—the idea that streams naturally strive towards an optimally stable form that balances flow and sediment transport—is the underlying premise of stream stability definitions that presume static channel morphology...

Prior to human disturbance, many of Colorado's small alluvial headwaters streams were naturally anastomosed wooded beaver streams or broad grassy wet meadows best described as Stage 0 in Cluer's and Thorne's 2013 Stream Evolution Model. Restoring natural Stage 0 streams provides greater hydrological, ecological, and habitat benefits compared to sta...

Today's dominance of entrenched single-thread channels with dry, disconnected riparian zones Southern Rockies headwaters alluvial streams is at least partially due to widespread anthropogenic conversion from native beaver streams. The conversion is explained using Cluer and Thorne's 2013 Stream Evolution Model (SEM) as a shift from Stage 0 to Stage...

Proposed method for evaluating stream health in compensatory mitigation

Summary To more accurately assess the current conservation status of the rare plant Mimulus gemmiparus (Phrymaceae), we visited all previously known sites of occurrence and documented the location, size, and condition of populations, and we searched for additional populations in nearby areas. In 84 searcher-hours of intensive search, we found at le...