Help Bark & beavers restore Mt. Hood
Bark is working alongside beavers—the forest’s ecosystem engineers—to protect and restore Mt. Hood’s most essential and overlooked ecosystems: its wetlands.
This year, Bark scored a major victory for Mt. Hood National Forest: we completed long-overdue updates to the National Wetlands Inventory for the Oak Grove and Middle Clackamas watersheds—a critical step toward protecting these vital ecosystems.
Now we’re building on that success. We’re retooling our wetlands program to map wetlands in and around active timber sales, securing protections for these vulnerable areas before they’re damaged.
At the same time, our beaver habitat program is entering a new phase—active restoration. Bark just secured approval to plant willows at several key sites on Mt. Hood National Forest to support beaver recolonization. (Join us for our next willow planting on Nov. 22nd!) As the only group doing beaver-focused restoration on Mt. Hood, we’re helping the forest heal itself by rebuilding the wetlands that slow water, store carbon, and buffer the forest against drought and wildfire.
As the Forest Service’s capacity for restoration dries up and our federal government overturns longstanding environmental protections, this work couldn’t matter more: over one million people rely on Mt. Hood National Forest for their drinking water. Bark’s wetlands and beaver programs are helping safeguard our water supply by restoring the natural systems that keep water flowing clean and cool.