New Framework Maps How Humans and Beavers Can Share Crowded Landscapes

When beavers vanished from the Netherlands in 1825, few could have predicted that nearly two centuries later the country would be wrestling with how to live alongside roughly 6,000 of them. Reintroduced in 1988 in the Biesbosch nature reserve, the Eurasian beaver has since recolonized Dutch waterways with remarkable success, aided by abundant channels and an absence of natural predators. But this conservation triumph has arrived in a landscape radically transformed by dikes, roads, railways, intensive agriculture, and sprawling cities. A new study published in the journal Ambio introduces a practical tool designed to untangle the resulting tensions: the Beaver Futures Framework, or BFF, which for the first time integrates both the celebrated benefits and the sometimes serious damages that beavers bring into a single, structured conversation about the future.

The research, led by Britt van Zelst of Wageningen University & Research and the Netherlands Institute of Ecology, together with colleagues from Wageningen, Radboud University, and NIOO-KNAW, responds to a stubborn problem in wildlife management. Human–wildlife conflicts are rarely just about animals. Instead, they reflect the diverse and often competing ways people perceive, value, and relate to nature. Some see beavers as intrinsically valuable creatures with a right to exist; others prize them as providers of flood control, water storage, and water purification; still others experience them primarily as burrowers undermining dikes or dammers flooding farm fields. Because these underlying values frequently go unspoken, disagreements harden into conflicts that damage both people and wildlife.

The Beaver Futures Framework draws directly on the Nature Futures Framework developed under the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, which distinguishes three positive value perspectives on nature: nature for nature, nature for society, and nature as culture. The BFF adapts these into four beaver-specific corners. ‘Beavers for Nature’ captures the intrinsic value of beavers, both for their own sake and as keystone ecosystem engineers whose dams, lodges, channels, and burrows create wetlands that shelter plants, amphibians, fish, birds, and mammals. ‘Beavers for Society’ emphasizes instrumental benefits such as flood mitigation, drought buffering, carbon storage, and improved water quality. ‘Beavers as Culture’ highlights relational values, the meaningful connections people forge through direct encounters with wildlife. Crucially, the fourth corner, ‘Beavers against Society,’ acknowledges the negative side: burrows destabilizing dikes, dams blocking culverts, and flooded croplands and timber stands.

Together these four perspectives form a diamond-shaped space defined by two axes. The polarisation axis runs between instrumental benefits and instrumental damages, revealing whether stakeholders see beavers as net assets, net liabilities, or something in between. The interaction axis runs between intrinsic and relational values, expressing how much direct engagement between people and beavers stakeholders actually want. The researchers emphasize that the corners represent extreme interpretations rather than mutually exclusive categories; the space between them allows for the nuance and overlap that characterize real human attitudes. This design makes the framework immediately usable in participatory settings, from workshops to surveys and focus groups, without requiring technical training in environmental valuation.

To test the framework, the team deployed it during a 45-minute workshop at the symposium ‘Burrowing in Dikes: Water Safety and Ecology,’ held on 28 June 2023 at Burgers’ Zoo in Arnhem. The event was organized by STOWA, the Foundation for Applied Water Research; Rijkswaterstaat, the Dutch Ministry of Infrastructure and Water Management; and the Kenniscentrum Beaver. The 72 participants who joined the workshop represented precisely the professionals who design, execute, and regulate beaver management in the Netherlands: water authority staff, managers of dikes, roads, and railways, nature conservationists, policymakers, and licensing officials. Using the interactive tool Mentimeter, participants first recorded their spontaneous first association with beavers, then identified values for each framework perspective, positioned themselves within the diamond, and finally chose a preferred future from four extreme scenarios.

The results yielded 288 beaver values, of which 166 were unique, spanning both positive and negative dimensions. Participants’ self-placements gravitated on average toward the ‘Beavers for Nature’ corner, suggesting a strong emphasis on beavers’ intrinsic worth among this professional community. On the polarisation axis, most clustered near the center, recognizing both benefits and drawbacks and struggling to weigh them against each other, a finding the authors say underscores the limits of conventional cost-benefit analysis for diffuse, long-term societal gains pitted against localized, immediate damages. When asked to select an ideal future, 65 percent chose local or regional zonation of beaver management, 28 percent preferred beavers everywhere, 7 percent wanted beavers confined to natural areas, and not a single participant chose a future without beavers.

The statistical analysis, corrected for scoring bias through a permutation-based approach with 9,999 permutations, revealed something subtler. While the overall distance between participants’ first associations and their self-placements was only marginally significant, the axis-specific test found a significant shift along the interaction axis, with self-placements indicating a preference for less interaction with beavers than initial associations suggested. The researchers interpret this convergence as evidence of mutual understanding developing in real time: as participants reflected on values expressed by others, their viewpoints gained nuance. The framework, in other words, did not merely collect opinions; it changed how people thought about the collective space of opinions, revealing shared ground and divergence alike.

The stakes in the Netherlands are unusually high. About one third of the country lies below sea level, and its flood defences are lifelines. Beavers digging burrows into dikes, levees, roads, and bridges pose a genuine public safety risk, while their dams obstruct drainage systems and complicate water management. Conflicts involving so-called problem-beavers have increased significantly over the past decade, and as natural habitats reach carrying capacity, beavers are settling in agricultural and even urban environments. Current management tends to be reactive and short-term, the authors note, because risks are hard to predict and measures are costly, leaving the debate locked in a repetitive argument over beaver pros and cons while the population continues to grow.

What makes the Beaver Futures Framework potentially transformative is its refusal to pick a side. By explicitly legitimizing negative associations alongside positive ones, it allows every stakeholder into the conversation, from flood-safety engineers to rewilding advocates, and prevents any single perspective from dominating. The authors stress that acknowledging damages does not undermine conservation; rather, it supports more realistic pathways of co-adaptation rather than conflict elimination. And because its structure is generic, the framework can be readily adapted to other contentious species, habitats, and ecosystems, from large carnivores returning to Europe’s crowded landscapes to any wildlife whose comeback forces societies to negotiate what living together actually means. In an era when conservation successes keep bringing wildlife back into human-dominated terrain, tools that make plural values visible may prove as important as the ecology itself. The Dutch beaver, once extinct and now divisive, has become the test case for that proposition.

Subject of Research: Stakeholder value perspectives on future human–beaver coexistence in the Netherlands

Article Title: The Beaver Futures Framework: Stakeholder value perspectives on future human–beaver coexistence

Article References: The Beaver Futures Framework: Stakeholder value perspectives on future human–beaver coexistence. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13280-026-02476-x

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s13280-026-02476-x

Keywords: beavers, human–wildlife coexistence, Beaver Futures Framework, Nature Futures Framework, ecosystem engineers, human–wildlife conflict, nature valuation, Netherlands, stakeholder participation, ecosystem services and disservices, rewilding, conservation