Beavers in the city: problem or partner?
Walk along Zurich’s Limmat riverbank and you might notice something odd: fresh wood chips scattered on the footpaths, tooth marks carved into tree trunks, and entire riverside willows reduced to stumps. But this isn’t vandalism, it’s the work of Zurich’s newest residents with serious engineering ambitions: European beavers are reshaping the city’s riverbanks, one tree at a time.
Their presence in Switzerland’s largest city is a relatively recent phenomenon. After being completely eradicated from Switzerland’s landscapes in the 19th century, the beaver is reclaiming not just rural areas, but also increasingly pushing into urban rivers and lakes. The return of the beaver to Switzerland was long seen as a rural success story. Yet today, with territories in rural areas becoming increasingly occupied, beavers are expanding into urban spaces as well. This shift brings both promise and friction. As ecosystem engineers, beavers can create biodiversity hotspots, retain stormwater, and recharge groundwater, benefits that align well with urban sustainability goals. But their engineering activities can also clash with city life: flooded footpaths, felled park trees, and occasional confrontations with domestic animals reveal the tensions of coexistence.
.gif)
Can beavers and people truly share the same spaces? And if so, how do we balance their ecological contributions against the disruptions they cause?
For answers to these questions, take a look at the in-depth blog post that we produced in the context of the Geography. Matters. module at the Department of Geography in the fall semester of 2025.
| About GEO410 This blog post is part of the outcome of an interdisciplinary Master’s-level course in Geography: GEO410 Geography. Matters. The course aims to bring together diverse geographic research perspectives to engage with some of the most pressing societal and environmental challenges of our time. As the only compulsory module of the Geography MSc program, the course encourages students to think across sub-disciplines of geography and to explore how geographic research can meaningfully contribute to debates around sustainability, justice, and environmental change. Beyond conducting interdisciplinary research as a team, a central aim of the course was to experiment with creative and accessible forms of science communication. Rather than producing a purely academic output, students translated their research insights into blogposts, intended for a wider, non-specialist audience. The contributions thus showcase not only rigorous scientific work by highly motivated students, but also the importance of communicating research beyond the university and engaging broader publics in conversations about geography, sustainability and the future of our shared environments. The students in the course GEO410 were supervised by Andreas Vieli, Christian Berndt and Sofia van Moorsel as lecturers and by Nikolas Klaudy as teaching assistant. |