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Project Goals

The primary objective of this project is to provide the US Forest Service, US National Park Service and the Bureau of Land Management with spatially explicit drainage network maps of the entire GYA that helps them better manage existing beaver populations and capitalize on opportunities for beaver to act as a restoration agent, while recognizing the potential impacts of nuisance beaver in particular areas. We believe the spatially explicit outputs from BRAT will provide biologists and manages with the information needed to effectively identify where nuisance beaver can be relocated, where ‘Living with Beaver’ strategies may be needed and where beaver can be used for watershed restoration efforts to have the greatest potential to yield increases in biodiversity and ecosystem services.

​Further information concerning the scope of this project can be found on the BRAT website in the GYA Brat folder.

Customizations for this project

Under this contract we reframed how the BRAT model assesses risk and opportunity for using beaver in conservation and restoration. These new outputs identify streams that are: low-risk with restoration and conservation opportunities, moderate or high risk where beavers can build dams and; natural or anthropogenically limited areas where beaver cannot build dams now. Specifically, the three beaver management layers/maps are:

1. ‘unsuitable or limited beaver dam building opportunities’,
2. ‘areas beavers can build dams, but could be undesirable’, and
3. ‘possible beaver dam conservation or restoration opportunities’.

Idaho BRAT Deliverable Data Products include:

This project will consist of implementing BRAT for the Wyoming portion of the GYA. This will include calibration, validation and refinement of the BRAT models on public lands. 

1. Develop and run BRAT on the perennial portion of the 1:24K NHD network segmented at 30m including:
   1. Existing (based on 2016 LANDFIRE data, the most current data available) beaver dam capacity estimates (dams /km)
   2. Historic beaver dam capacity estimates (based on LANDFIRE BPS data (dams /km)
   3. Potential for human beaver conflict (probability)
      1. Refine conflict model (include public tolerance to beaver dams per region).
   4. Beaver management, restoration and conservation predictions reflecting management priorities
2. Calibration and validation of BRAT performance using harvest and nuisance trapping data.
3. Conduct workshops with the GYA partners to build more meaningful conflict potential models and management layers that reflect variation in land owner and manager management priorities as well as tolerance for potential beaver impacts. 

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More detailed info at brat.riverscapes.xyz