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

The urgency behind the paper stems from the escalating ecological crisis and the growing recognition that the way humanity values nature shapes how it is protected or destroyed. People value nature in profoundly different ways: instrumentally, for the material benefits it provides; intrinsically, for its existence independent of any human observer; and relationally, through the meanings, identities and social bonds that arise from human–nature interactions. The Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, or IPBES, emphasized in its 2022 Methodological Assessment of the Diverse Values and Valuation of Nature that most current valuation processes capture only a narrow slice of these values, typically monetary and quantitative ones, which can produce environmental injustices and conflicts while ignoring worldviews of indigenous peoples and local communities.

To translate plural valuation into practice, researchers have identified four values-centered leverage points for transformative change: recognizing the diverse values of nature in valuation methods; embedding those values into decision-making; reforming policies, rights and regulations to internalize nature’s values; and shifting the deeper societal norms, beliefs and goals that underpin how people relate to nature and to each other. Drawing on leverage point theory popularized by Donella Meadows, the authors note that these intervention points cascade in depth—shallower points are easier to act on but yield less change, while deeper points are harder to activate but hold far greater transformative potential when engaged.

The new perspective, the product of two expert workshops hosted by the Open Universiteit in 2022 and 2023, systematically maps how citizen science can strengthen interventions at each of these leverage points. At the first point, recognizing diverse values, citizen science initiatives such as Drinkable Rivers, Curieuze Neuzen in Belgium, and the Dutch Network Ecological Monitoring demonstrate that the questions citizens ask and the species or landscapes they monitor often reflect deeply held values and concerns. Because participants are drawn from varied localities, socio-economic backgrounds and identities, their involvement can widen the spectrum of values that enter formal valuation, though the authors caution that environmental citizen science remains biased toward quantitative data collection, overrepresenting instrumental and intrinsic values while leaving relational values largely implicit.

Measuring relational values—attachments to places, species and nature in general—requires methodological innovation. The researchers point to emerging approaches such as citizens’ written letters to trees, micronarratives and behavioral data on species preferences, which can be combined with ecological measurements to illuminate socio-ecological interactions. They also flag a fundamental trade-off: methods capable of capturing rich detail about people’s values tend to be more complex and time-consuming, reducing the volume of data collected, while high-volume approaches may flatten the very diversity of values that plural valuation seeks to reveal.

At the second leverage point, embedding valuation into inclusive decision-making, the evidence is striking. Citizen-collected air quality data from the Louisiana Bucket Brigade in the United States and the Samen Meten program run by the Dutch national public health institute have shaped governmental policy agendas. In Europe, citizen observatories deliberately link citizens, scientists and decision-makers in shared monitoring of local environments. The authors document cases where citizen science has even entered the courtroom: plastic pollution data gathered by volunteers contributed to a petrochemical company being found liable, and species observations by Swedish citizens have been used in environmental court cases. Participation also reshapes personal decisions, with studies showing that citizen scientists adopt more biodiversity-friendly gardening practices and strengthen their personal connection to nature—effects that ripple outward through the communities and social networks these initiatives create.

Yet the path is not without obstacles. Doubts about the quality of citizen-generated data among scientists and policymakers, persistent power dynamics in decision-making circles, and a lack of agency, skills or resources among decision-makers all constrain uptake. Studies further reveal a persistent demographic skew: citizen science participants tend to be white, highly educated, older and more affluent, which narrows the knowledge produced and limits environmental justice. At the third, deeper leverage point of institutional reform, the authors highlight structural embedding efforts such as the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework’s agreement to involve citizens in knowledge co-creation and the more4nature initiative, which seeks to institutionalize collaboration between citizen science projects and authorities responsible for policy implementation and monitoring. But they also warn that institutionalization carries risks: when data flow into analytical pipelines, ties with the volunteers who collected them can weaken, and the sense of pride and emotional enrichment that motivates citizen scientists can erode if their knowledge becomes an untraceable instrument.

The deepest leverage point—shifting societal norms and paradigms—is where citizen science may hold its most profound potential. Empirical studies show that participation strengthens place attachment, nature connectedness and nature-noticing over both short and long timescales. Communities formed around monitoring projects build shared values and collective action, and so-called citizen science ambassadors inspire pro-environmental attitudes in their social circles. The authors caution, however, that it is methodologically difficult to distinguish values genuinely transformed by participation from values participants already held, and some longitudinal studies find no attitude change because participants began with strongly positive orientations toward nature. Measuring such shifts demands new approaches that explicitly track emotional connectedness and underlying norms.

From this analysis the team distills three overarching recommendations. First, recognize and measure: relational values must be made explicit in citizen science design, supported by new quantitative and qualitative methods, since they are both key motivations for participation and outcomes strengthened by it. Second, embrace diversity: plural valuation calls for plural publics, meaning the full variety of citizen science formats—from top-down governmental programs to grassroots community-led efforts—should be cultivated, with flexible roles that allow citizens, scientists and policymakers to grow into varied responsibilities. Third, pursue structural integration: case-by-case policy engagement is growing, but lasting change requires structural funding, long-term collaborations, storytelling that showcases how citizen science has informed decisions, and open science principles that ease institutionalization into policy processes.

The authors conclude that uniting citizen science and plural valuation is not merely an academic win–win but a necessary foundation for inclusive, effective environmental action and conservation. As governments worldwide struggle to meet biodiversity targets amid widening distrust in institutions, the perspective suggests a practical and democratizing pathway: the millions of volunteers already counting birds, measuring rivers and sensing air pollution are not just collecting data—they are articulating, practicing and fostering a richer, more plural vision of what nature is worth, and in doing so, they may be pulling the deepest levers of transformative change.

Subject of Research: Integrating citizen science with plural valuation of nature to leverage transformative change

Article Title: Uniting citizen science and plural valuation: Potential for leveraging transformative change

Article References: Verploegen, H., Dyke, A. J., Ganzevoort, W., Hugé, J., Jacobs, S., Neuteleers, S., Prats López, M., Verschuuren, B., & Wehn, U. (2026). Uniting citizen science and plural valuation: Potential for leveraging transformative change. Ambio. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13280-026-02458-z

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s13280-026-02458-z

Keywords: citizen science, plural valuation, transformative change, relational values, environmental policy, IPBES, leverage points, biodiversity, nature connectedness, environmental justice, Uniting, citizen