Beaver Assisted Water Management

Bob Kobres from Georgia is the retired UGA librarian who keeps a special watch on science news and research published that may be relevant to beavers. He generally sends me two kinds of articles: reports that draw attention to the role that beavers play in biodiversity and water management, and reports that should include a discussion of beavers, but don’t.

Guess which kind this is?

How to stop human-made droughts and floods before they start

Alberta’s rivers are the main source of water for agriculture in Canada’s Prairie provinces. But climate change and increased human interference mean that the flow of these headwaters is under threat. This could have major implications for Canadian gross domestic product, and even global food security.

A new study published in Hydrological Processes sheds light on sources of streamflow variability and change in Alberta’s headwaters that can affect irrigated agriculture in the Prairies. This provides the knowledge base to develop improved water resource management to effectively adapt to evolving river flow conditions.

“This study is a call for better understanding of the complex interactions between natural and human-made change in river systems” says the study’s lead author, Ali Nazemi, assistant professor in Concordia’s Department of Building, Civil and Environmental Engineering.

Nazemi and his co-authors developed a mathematical process to examine streamflow and climate data and carry out a case study on eight streams within the Oldman River Basin in Southern Alberta. They discovered various forms of change in the annual average streamflow and timing of the yearly peak in Alberta’s headwater streams throughout the 20th century.

“We saw that change in streamflow can be mainly linked to temperature variance, as well as to human regulations through water resource management,” says Nazemi.

Obviously creek flow has a lot to do with river flow. And how we treat our smaller systems affects the bigger ones. When we drain our our creeks, incise them so they produce flashy water, or fill them with concrete we affect the water rivers get to work with. And when healthy beaver dams are stepped gradually through our creeks they gradually release water over time and regulate outflow into rivers in way that helps human needs and agriculture.

We apparently don’t have the cajones to tackle climate change any time soon, but beavers have all the skill they need to alter runoff right now.

If we just let them.

Nazemi hopes that this study will lead to the development of effective regional water resource management in the Prairies and beyond.

“The major river systems around the world are now highly regulated by human activity—and the natural streamflow regime is perturbed by climate change. This study can provide a scientific methodology to understand the effects of different natural and anthropogenic drivers on river flows. This is the first step towards development of effective management strategies that can face the ever-increasing threats to our precious freshwater resources in Canada and globally.”