by Amin Casutt, Angela Sara Mürner, Gleb Kabakovitch, Lawrence Bassfeld, Pascal Andreas Heiniger
Our blog invites readers to experience urban nature in Zürich through the eyes of Castor, a young beaver, and his grandfather. Set along the Limmat, the story blends fictional dialogue with scientific- and legal knowledge to explore how beavers have returned to the city and what their presence reveals about changing human–nature relations.
Through the beavers’ conversations, the post reflects on Zurich’s transformation from wetland and floodplain forests to a densely built city, while also highlighting recent efforts to restore ecological space. Interwoven factual sections explain the ecological role of the Eurasian beaver as an ecosystem engineer: by building dams and lodges, beavers slow water flow, reduce erosion and create habitats that enhance biodiversity.
Our blog also addresses the conflicts that arise when beavers settle in urban areas, including flooding, infrastructure damage, and tree loss. Rather than framing beavers as a problem, it presents river revitalization and coexistence strategies as sustainable solutions that reduce long-term management costs while allowing beavers to provide valuable ecosystem services.
By combining storytelling, ecological science, and policy context, the blog raises broader questions about coexistence, responsibility, and the future of urban rivers. Can cities truly make space for non-human residents, and what might a shared future look like?
To follow Castor’s journey and dive deeper into the science, conflicts, and visions surrounding beavers in Zurich, explore the full blog post we produced in the context of the Geography. Matters. module at the Department of Geography in the fall semester of 2025.
Through a Beaver’s Eyes
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.
Beitragsbild: Conceptual rendition of a typical beaver habitat along the Limmat prior to urbanization. Image: Blog authors and ChatGPT