For decades, this desert river barely flowed, its crumbling banks losing every drop before it reached the sea. Then engineers tried something radical—throwing thousands of dead trees directly into the water.
In 2020, on a ranch near Grand Junction, Colorado, where the state line meets Utah, a work crew began driving wooden posts into the dry gravel of a creek bed. The posts were untreated pine. The fill material was dead wood collected by hand from the floodplain. The river runs 20 miles through this 76,000-acre property of canyons and desert. By the end of the decade, more than 200 such structures we…
Wildlife officials dropped 240 beavers into dying Pacific Northwest streams—and the ecosystem response was anything but expected. The rodents were meant to restore degraded waterways, rebuilding dams that had vanished for a century.
In the mountains of Washington state, biologists have spent more than a decade moving beavers into streams that were losing water. The animals, once considered pests, have rebuilt wetlands, stored millions of gallons of water, cooled rivers for salmon, and created natural firebreaks across dry landscapes.The work began in 2007 in the Methow Valley, where streams feeding the Eastern Cascade Mountai…