This summer, Wildlands Restoration Volunteers (WRV) will continue to build upon a successful year of in-stream project work begun in 2023 in northern Larimer County. In 2024, sponsorship from Audubon will enable WRV to partner with the Larimer Conservation District and continue work at Diamond Peak Ranch. 

In-stream restoration projects utilize low-tech process-based restoration techniques to slow water, capture sediment, stabilize banks, and spread water across a larger footprint, helping to encourage greater infiltration and healthier watersheds. Structures such as beaver dam analogs, post-assisted log structures, or log jams mimic the functions that beaver can play in a system. Beaver dams provide many benefits to river systems. Installing beaver dam analogs (BDAs) helps make it easier for beaver to build dams of their own so they can sustain a healthy river ecosystem. Our efforts will improve water quality, increase riparian habitat, and help mitigate the impacts of flooding downstream.

Volunteers will build these structures partly out of material created by forest thinning in the separate Forests: Diamond Peak Fire Mitigation project series.

Learn more and register here through WRV.

Beaver wetland. Photo: Evan Barrientos/Audubon Rockies