PROVIDENCE — Students at Esek Hopkins Middle School are searching for beavers.

Tasked with placing trail cameras along the West River that runs beside their school, the students hope to record the behavior of local animal species.

Reviewing their footage, they observed a beaver emerging from the calm banks late at night. Instead of collecting nearby branches for its lodge or searching for food, the beaver squatted over a mud mound and lifted its tail — squirting its pheromones with a squelch, much to the excitement of the middle schoolers. 

Hosted by Wild Lives, this grade school program emphasizes environmental connection and scientific curiosity. Beavers are one of the key species the students track, as they are increasing in prevalence throughout Rhode Island. 

As an instructor for Wild Lives and a Rhode Island School of Design graduate and educator, Jasmine Gutbrod works alongside these students, giving them simple instructions and letting them study the animals themselves. 

When asked about the impact of her work, she believes change lies in the teaching process, “teaching other people how to look, see, make things, and explore the environment,” Gutbrod said. 

The children watched the footage, crafting personalities and stories around each animal they saw. The beaver slowly nudges the camera, before being spooked and scuttling off — he is deemed one of the more suspicious inhabitants of the pond. Gutbrod explained how these stories helped the students to piece together the animals’ biological role through storytelling and anthropomorphism. 

Beavers are large rodents, so they are less courageous than their predator counterparts, like otters and minks. Beavers are most known for their characteristic buck teeth, large, rounded tails, and their ability to build structures that completely alter the environment around them. Due to this behavior, they are considered a keystone species — meaning if they were to be removed from their environment, the ecosystem could collapse. And until fairly recently, they were nearly extinct in Rhode Island.

The beaver’s decline throughout Rhode Island and the United States started during the fur trade in the 1800s when beaver pelts were in fashion. By the tail end of the century, beavers were hunted to near extinction, with the U.S. beaver population falling from 60 million to 400 million individuals to as low as 100,000 individuals. 

Conservation efforts in Rhode Island included reintroduction and new protections, and in 1976 the first beaver lodge was found in a brook that leads into Carbuncle Pond in Coventry. Since then, the population has skyrocketed, and today, they are no longer considered at risk, according to the state Department of Environmental Management. 

But tensions are still present between beavers and humans. 

Beavers’ tendency to dam up manmade waterways can cause flooding, damaging homes, businesses, and infrastructure. This has been prevalent in the northern part of the state — most notably in late August 2025 on North Smithfield’s Mechanic Street where beaver activity on a private property resulted in the flooding of town roads and nearby private yards. This has sparked debates among community members and council members and there is an ongoing discussion about how to live with the creatures. 

Despite potential solutions such as relocation and euthanization, beavers are almost inevitable in towns near water sources, according to ecologist John Crockett. Crockett recently completed research for his dissertation focusing on the distribution of semi-aquatic mammals — one species being the beaver. 

Crockett says beavers are exceptionally resilient, they’re able to live close to humans, in tandem with cities and industrialization.

During his own research, Crockett witnessed the beavers’ relentless building. In one of the datasets he was using, the same culvert that goes under the Amtrak tracks in Westerly, R.I., had a particularly stubborn colony. “They had to go remove a dam like a dozen times or something,” Crockett laughed.

Crockett says there has to be balance between beavers and humans.. While they can cause issues for human populations, there are solutions that are able to mitigate flooding and still allow them to coexist alongside communities.

“They were here for a long time before being pushed out of this part of the world,” Crockett said. “I think people just forgot that they used to be here.”

While their industrious wooden structures can put them at odds with human communities, ongoing research suggests beavers might be a key to combating climate change.

The beaver is a dynamic creature, and Rhode Island’s water systems used to be dynamic as well, said University of Rhode Island professor emeritus Arthur Gold. Gold studies natural resources science and published a study on how beavers chemically alter their environment, which means that they can impact their ecosystem on a scale scientists didn’t expect.

Beavers are key in removing nitrous oxide (N2O), which is 300 times as potent a greenhouse gas as carbon dioxide (CO2). N2O builds up in waterways as a result of runoff from agricultural practices and negatively impacts water quality downstream. 

Beavers’ tendencies to alter river currents due to their construction of dams also directly impacts the water’s speed. Decreased water speed means more time for plant growth, which will then decompose into organic matter, which creates the ideal conditions to remove nitrogen from streams. Beaver dams promote plant growth and create slow-moving ponds, allowing denitrification, a natural process that reduces nitrogen levels in the water.

“The big thing that beavers do is they change your river system from everybody’s conception of a river,” Gold said. When people think of rivers, they think of straight streams, canals, and a rushing current. But this wasn’t always the case.

“The reality is, in a lot of areas, because of beaver ponds, it would be a pond, a river, a pond,” he said. “So wetlands were all over the place.”

Beavers keep the ecosystem dynamic, which allows for more species diversity and healthier rivers. 

When beavers are present in a waterway, they can remove around 5% to 45% of existing nitrogen. Despite this natural solution, some areas in Rhode Island, such as Providence, are investing billions of dollars to remove nitrogen from waterways. Some strategies include wastewater treatment facilities that remove pollutants from key water sources, like the Providence River. 

Beavers are challenging the current perception of what it means to effectively combat climate change. “The whole idea is can we harness the natural world to restore the natural ecosystems,” Gold said. “Beavers, they are really at the forefront.”

Beavers are making waves beyond Rhode Island. On the other side of the country, they are being encouraged in certain areas in order to combat forest fires and droughts, due to their ponds redistributing water across their environment. 

Even across the pond, in the United Kingdom, beavers are being successfully reintroduced after being extinct for centuries. Now, they are also being implemented in flood management plans and heralded as a crucial component of the ecosystem. 

Through science, beavers can help restore our environment and integrate alongside Rhode Island communities. Science also is what allows them to be studied down to their habits — even by middle schoolers on the local level, whose attitudes towards beavers will make up the next generation’s views on these animals. 

Gutbrod believes that if children are provided with the same tools as field biologists, they are able to partake in the scientific process.

“We were trying to emphasize how grade school kids can be citizen scientists,” Gutbrod said. 

This story was published as part of a collaboration between ecoRI News and students in Brown University’s Science Journalism class. The stories examine the science, history, and human experiences connected to the Ocean State’s rivers — from water quality and wildlife restoration to flooding, pollution, social justice, and the communities working to protect them. To read more of these stories, click here.