One key question in stream restoration is “What state are you restoring to?” The idea of shifting baselines— that our ideas of how streams should look like is based on current conditions, and can’t encompass previous massive land use changes like beaver
One key question in stream restoration is “What state are you restoring to?” The idea of shifting baselines— that our ideas of how streams should look like is based on current conditions, and can’t encompass previous massive land use changes like beaver removal—came into river restoration literature as well. In her 2006 article “Human impacts to mountain streams”, geomorphologist Ellen Wohl notes that because beaver occurred before European settlement of N. America, our cultural image of pristine streams is of streams unmodified by beaver. In the Salmon Creek watershed, where I am doing my dissertation work, beaver are currently absent, and the California Department of Fish and Wildlife considers them to be “non native nuisance species” because some beavers were reintroduced from Idaho during t