I was recently reading up on Beaver Dam Analogs for a fiction project and thought I'd share some of the links I found really interesting. I got started on it because I frequently go for walks in the woods and there's an old logging road/snowmobile trail the beavers frequently flood since it's a low spot between two water bodies. I don't mind and just walk into the woods below their dam to hop across but a nearby landowner keeps destroying their dam to keep the trail dry. I wondered if I couldn't build them the start of a dam on the uphill side of the trail so they'd build there instead and keep the guy from escalating.

Anyways, I read up on it and learned about BDAs and PALS and the way they can help bring the habitat, water table, etc closer to how they looked a couple hundred years ago and wrote them into a premade campaign guide I'm writing for the Tabletop Role Playing Game Fully Automated.

Folks here probably know about these already but I thought I'd share the sources I referenced when I was writing that section just in case.

https://www.science.org/content/article/beaver-dams-without-beavers-artificial-logjams-are-popular-controversial-restoration

https://americanclimatepartners.org/building-beaver-dam-analogs-bdas/

https://www.northwoodscenter.org/wordpress/how-to-build-beaver-dam-analogs-w-mwa/

https://www.beaverinstitute.org/get-beaver-help/damaged-streams/

I think the process and scope of the recovery in some areas is amazing and it's sort of reshaped how I see some of the region where I grew up. Some of the woods are the exact kind of beaver-based wetlands these articles describe as the sort of finished product, while some streams are deeply incised and I never even realized that was bad - it was just how they'd always been.