Beavers are powerful architects of the land that bring innumerable benefits to the land and the people living there. They can make rivers run backwards, create fish habitat, mitigate wildfires, among other things. Indigenous people know this, but colonizers have disrupted the relationship between beaver and human. One researcher hopes to repair the relationship now… through robots.
Jordan Kennedy is a beaver expert and a former engineering post-doc at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, now working at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. She’s also a member of the Blackfeet Nation. As a part of her research at Harvard, she worked with a robotics team to create a robot beaver, affectionately called Beaverbot 2.0.
The beaverbot is a pale plywood box sitting on wide wheels that has two shovel-like attachments in the front, like a little excavator. While it might not look like a beaver, it’s supposed to work the land like a beaver would.
The beaverbot is programmed to make decisions about where to go in the same way as a real foraging beaver might. Kennedy hopes once the beaver is finished, they can use it on a research site.
“We’re trying to reimagine these landscapes as if beavers had been deployed on them in order to figure out a way to make it hold more water on the landscape,” Kennedy said.
Beavers are incredible ecosystem engineers. Their works make rivers run backwards, create fish habitat, mitigate wildfires, and many more things. But in the past few centuries, American settlers hunted beavers and destroyed their habitat, driving them out of the lands they used to build on.
Kennedy grew up sliding over beaver dams as a little kid in the streams and rivers near home on the Blackfeet reservation. In her PhD program at Harvard, she set out to write her thesis on how to build like a beaver. She learned that beavers don’t just build dams and lodges, but also other kinds of structures, like trails and canals, and those trails and canals are used like architectural cues that help the next generation figure out where to build.
She said humans can also communicate with beavers in that way.
“Perhaps we can tap into the mechanisms of communication that they have to say, hey, we'd really like you to build here or not build here,” Kennedy said.
Beavers, it turns out, will take over human imitations of their work, if the conditions are right. In New England, ecologists working to restore fish habitat found beavers moving into their beaver dam analogs, makeshift dams made out of local vegetation that generally slow water flow like a beaver dam would.
“They'll actually take it over and make it way better than we ever could,” said Erin Rodgers, program manager for Trout Unlimited in Massachusetts and Vermont.
Rodgers said humans who don’t want beavers in their neighborhood have fewer options to move beavers in states like Massachusetts and Vermont. If beaver dam analogs can entice beavers away, that’s one way to resolve those conflicts.
It’s not just about getting beavers further away from humans. Last spring, a family of European beavers in the Czech Republic moved in on a years-long dam project and finished the job, saving the government approximately $1.2 million.
“I mean, the very best thing you could do is partner with beavers directly, full stop,” Kennedy said. “I have a hard time believing I'm in a situation where I can out-engineer a beaver.”
Kennedy has chosen Rumney Marsh, an hour’s drive north of Boston, as the research site where the beaverbot will be deployed first.
It’s a protected area with miles of wetland and lots of vegetation, close to two large rivers and the ocean.
This marsh is actually the only thing stopping these rivers from overflowing and flooding the surrounding towns — Saugus, Revere, and Lynn. Big storms in the last few decades have caused fast and destructive flooding here, once putting more than three thousand homes underwater.
As sea levels rise, that kind of damage could be more common. One study found a storm here could cause more than a billion dollars of flood damage if something doesn’t change.
The answer to these challenges: beavers. Kennedy said the wetlands created by beaver architecture are like giant sponges that absorb floodwater and rain and slow potential floods down. During times of drought, beaver dams create “refugia” that store water on the land.
While beavers have colonized some of the areas downstream, Rumney Marsh hasn’t had beavers for over a century and has lost all signs of beaver architecture.
Kennedy’s robot will dig around Rumney Marsh the way a foraging beaver would. Then, hopefully, real beavers will move in.
“The most ideal thing for Rumney Marsh would be to get this landscape to a point where beavers are like, this looks good. I got it from here,” Kennedy said.
The Blackfeet Nation, Jordan’s people, have been in partnership with beavers since time immemorial.
Alicia Yellowowl works at Blackfeet community college and teaches community members to build beaver dam analogs. Yellowowl says the beaver brings great medicine to humans and other animals, calling back to the beaver’s role in Blackfoot stories of the creation of the world.
“That’s how powerful he is, is that he can create an ecosystem, sometimes out of nothing,” Yellowowl said.
The Blackfeet people have also had to contend with human-beaver conflicts in recent years. The Nation hired Jim Vaile, a beaver biologist, to help mediate between beavers and humans.
Before he started the job, Vaile heard a worrying story.
“This person was doing a sweat and about 2 weeks before that, he killed a beaver,” Vaile said. “It was on his land. So he had his sweat. And inside that sweat, his grandfathers came out, said, if you kill one of my children, then I'm out to take one of yours.”
Vaile said these kinds of things happen because American settlers criminalized spiritual practices that uphold a traditional relationship with beavers. Knowledge about ways of living with the beaver was forced to go underground.
“The elders feel that that is slipping by, because there's not enough beaver or not enough people educating the community,” Vaile said.
Now, Yellowowl and Vaile work to overcome the effects of cultural genocide and share traditional knowledge about living with the beaver.
Kennedy says this view of other animal species is not the kind of framework historically used by ecologists and engineers. But it’s a worldview that’s urgently needed, not only to conserve the species but to protect our lands and ourselves.
“We are on a doomed path, for sure,” Kennedy said. “I think it's really important, from an ethics standpoint, to imagine the world from another species point of view.”
Kennedy hopes ecologists can apply this perspective to other animals, like bison and prairie dogs, to explore more ecological benefits and restore the relationship between human and animal.