Collaboration in Action
Wyoming Beaver Restoration Project
Elevating Beavers Through Collaboration
Wyoming Untrapped is teaming up with scientists, conservation organizations, restoration practitioners, landowners, and community members to elevate the role beavers can play in creating healthier, more resilient landscapes.
The new Wyoming Beaver Conservation Project is bringing together animal protection, biodiversity science, restoration expertise, and community engagement around a shared goal: more thriving beaver-occupied wetlands across Wyoming.
Led by the University of Wyoming Biodiversity Institute, with Wyoming Natural Diversity Database, Utah State University, Wyoming Untrapped, Wyoming Coalition for Animal Protection and others is helping build the scientific foundation needed to better understand where beavers are living today, where suitable habitat exists, and where restoration could have the greatest potential.
Together, we want to move beaver conservation forward—from appreciation to understanding, and from understanding to action.
A Healthier Wyoming, One Wetland at a Time
Beavers are extraordinary ecosystem engineers. By building dams and creating wetlands, they slow and spread water across the landscape, increase habitat complexity, and can contribute to improved water quality, water storage, biodiversity, and resilience to drought and wildfire.
Yet beavers were once driven to historic lows across much of North America by the commercial fur trade of the 19th century. Although populations have rebounded considerably, beavers continue to face challenges from trapping, drought, disease, habitat loss, and other pressures on the landscapes they depend upon.
Their recovery matters—not only for beavers, but for the wetlands, wildlife, and watersheds their presence can help sustain.
But we still don’t have a clear statewide picture of where Wyoming’s greatest opportunities for beaver conservation and restoration exist.
The Wyoming Beaver Conservation Project is working to change that.
By combining science, mapping, field observations, and local knowledge, the project will help identify where beavers are currently living, where suitable habitat exists without beavers, and where conservation or restoration efforts may offer the greatest ecological benefit statewide.
Wyoming Beaver @savannahrosewildlife
Help Build the Science Behind Beaver Restoration
A gift to the Beaver Conservation Excellence Fund will support the foundational science needed to guide beaver conservation and restoration across Wyoming, mapping where beavers belong.
Your support will help to:
- Map Wyoming’s beaver habitat
In this phase of the project, streams will be identified and landscapes that may provide suitable habitat for beavers. - Find where beavers already live
By mapping current beaver occupancy, we can discover where beavers are thriving and where suitable habitat may currently be unoccupied. - Identify opportunities
By comparing suitable habitat with current occupancy, we can identify areas where there may be opportunities for natural recolonization or restoration. - Explore benefits for water and wildlife resilience
Beaver information will be combined with other landscape data to help identify places where beaver wetlands could potentially provide benefits such as increased water storage and wildlife mitigation. - Work with communities and partners
Restoration works best when people are part of the process. So, we’ll work with partners, volunteers, landowners, and other stakeholders to help verify information on the ground and identify opportunities for collaboration.
The first goal is to raise $150,000 for the Beaver Conservation Excellence Fund, with the support of generous private donors who share this vision by kickstarting the fundraising campaign with a $15K donation!
Beaver Restoration Assessment Tool (BRAT)
Why Wyoming Needs This Science
Beaver activity can transform a landscape. Their dams may increase water retention, create wetlands, improve habitat complexity, and support biodiversity both in and around streams. Keeping water on the landscape longer can increase resilience to drought and wildfire, support wetlands and wildlife, and help sustain stream flows from Wyoming’s headwaters.
But beaver conservation and restoration aren’t one-size-fits-all.
This project is working to better understand where beavers are making a difference, how ecosystems respond, and how science can help guide future conservation and restoration efforts. We will use the Beaver Restoration Assessment Tool (BRAT) to map current and potential beaver habitat across Wyoming, then work with community scientists and partners to ground-truth those predictions in the field.
This is more than a mapping project. It is an investment in the science, partnerships, and public understanding needed to give beavers—and the wetlands they create—a stronger future in Wyoming.
Collaboration in Action
The Wyoming Beaver Conservation Project brings together expertise led by the University of Wyoming Biodiversity Institute, Wyoming Natural Diversity Database, Wyoming Untrapped, Wyoming Coalition for Animal Protection, Utah State University, and other scientists, restoration partners, landowners, and community members.
Each partner brings something different to the table: scientific expertise, wildlife knowledge, restoration experience, community engagement, and a commitment to healthier watersheds.
By working together, we can build knowledge that is scientifically sound, useful on the ground, and capable of supporting beaver conservation efforts for years to come.
Healthy beavers. Healthy wetlands. A more resilient Wyoming.