WATER Institute Co-Directors Kate Lundquist and Brock Dolman are feeling truly inspired after attending BeaverCON 2024 in Boulder, Colorado, last month. This renowned international gathering of beaver and process-based restoration experts is produced by our partners at The Beaver Institute and happens in a different US city every two years. It will be held in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in 2026.
This sold-out three-day conference was bookended by workshops and tours of nearby restoration sites and coexistence strategies. Nearly 500 attendees from tribal nations, NGOs, agencies, academia, foundations, restoration companies and other entities came from all over North America and Europe to learn about best practices from one another. In addition to having Colorado Governor Jared Polis come speak, California Natural Resource Agency Secretary Wade Crowfoot gave an inspiring keynote address.
Highlights included getting to see California partners from The Tule River Tribe, the Maidu Summit Consortium, The Yurok Tribe, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, Defenders of Wildlife, and the SLO Beaver Brigade participating in the conference. Another highlight was getting to reconnect with and meet new partners from the United Kingdom and Germany. We are excited about the prospect of reuniting next September 2025 at the 10th International Beaver Symposium in Inverness, Scotland.
This conference provides a critically important venue for sharing ideas and dreaming up new beaver restoration strategies with participants from the northern hemisphere. We all have so much to learn from one another’s successes and challenges. Brock and Kate were grateful to have been given an opportunity to talk about the long game they have been playing over the past twenty years to win their Bring Back the Beaver campaign.
In addition to getting to share our work with this amazing audience, we got to help facilitate a “power mapping” exercise in collaboration with the Beaver Institute’s National Policy and Management Working Group. Power mapping has been a very successful and strategic tool OAEC uses to determine who we need to get to say “yes” to help us achieve our beaver restoration and other goals.
