Impacts
Opinions vary widely on whether the beavers' activities are beneficial or detrimental, and depend on how the interpreter is affected by their activities.
Negative Impacts
Generally, beavers' negative impacts affect man's land use practices. Their ponds flood timber, agricultural crops, lawns, and roads. Their dams obstruct bridges, culverts, and pond drains, causing erosion damage to these structures. When feeding, beavers girdle and fell trees and shrubs, and damage agricultural crops. Their bank dens and burrows often can weaken dams, dikes, and road beds.
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Positive Impacts
When beaver ponds are situated in areas that do not interfere directly with man's land use practices, the impacts of beaver presence can affect man's environment in a positive way. Often beaver ponds are situated in areas that do not interfere directly with man's land use practices. In these cases, the positive impacts of beaver ponds far outweigh the negative impacts by slowing run-off from drainage areas and retarding erosion. They also filter silt, agricultural chemicals and pollutants from streams, and generally improve water quality for fish, wildlife, and man.
Beaver ponds provide quality habitat for other furbearers, waterfowl, fish, non-game wildlife and endangered species. During periods of drought they provide water for wildlife, livestock, and irrigation. Beaver ponds often provide abundant recreational opportunities to sportsmen for hunting, fishing, and trapping. In addition, trapping for beavers and other furbearers and leasing beaver ponds for waterfowl hunting can provide valuable supplemental income to landowners.
Beaver ponds provide ideal habitat for ducks. North Carolina's native wood duck populations increased significantly following increases in beaver populations and wood duck harvest has more than doubled since the beaver population increase. Wood duck nest boxes, combined with natural tree cavities in beaver ponds, make these areas ideal brood habitat for wood ducks. In some instances, landowners have partially drained the ponds during the summer, and planted them in Japanese millet to provide winter feed for waterfowl.
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