Results of a Beaver Inventory on the Aspen-Sopris Ranger District of White River National Forest, Colorado

A beaver and beaver habitat inventory was conducted in 2023-2024 in the Roaring Fork Valley, Colorado. The Pitkin County Healthy Rivers Board provided $100,000 to the Forest for this project. The Forest hired seasonals with those funds to collect empirical beaver and habitat data via randomly selected survey sites across ~360,000 acres of the headwaters of the Roaring Fork River. We found that 17% of our random survey points were currently occupied by beaver in 11 of the 15 HUC12’s we sampled, and another 37% of sites had evidence of former beaver occupation in all 15 sampled HUCs, indicating that there used to be more widespread beaver than there are currently.  We believe that the limited availability of willow and aspen are contributing factors to the current distribution of beaver on the Forest.   

There is a lot of (deserved) interest in beaver currently given the confluence of popular and scientific literature on the topic, Colorado Parks and Wildlife’s pending beaver management plan, wildfire, the resent passage of SB270, and persistent and acute drought in the Colorado River Basin.  There is also little empirical information in the literature about the current distribution and status of beaver on western National Forests/public lands.  My thought is that many of your conference attendees may be interested to hear what an empirical survey found on a reasonably representative swath of Western Slope National Forest.