Today is a great day in beaver-reporting land, because it’s the day that Denise Burchsted showed some ground breaking work to the media in using GoPro cams to film the fish in beaver ponds. If her name sounds vaguely familiar it should, because she’s the very bright mind behind the “River Discontinuum” which I wrote about way back in 2011. She’s the fluvial engineer that wants to apply the lessons of beaver dams to our urban settings, without actually using those pesky beavers.

Field biology shows that GoPro cameras aren’t just for snowboarding daredevils

An important skill for scientists is knowing where to spend your funding, which explains why Keene State College’s Denise Burchsted sounded proud when she described her protocol for studying beaver ponds: “Rather than investing in winches to pull undergraduate students out of the muck, I invested in a few GoPro cameras.”

Don’t worry, KSC parents: This assistant professor of environmental studies isn’t abandoning biology majors to the Cheshire County mire. Rather, Burchsted is developing a new – and cheap – way to understand the difficult-to-investigate ponds that are created by beaver dams, which are a focus of her research partly because they haven’t been analyzed as much as you might think.

“It’s hard to study beaver ponds. Boating is usually difficult, because the ponds are too shallow and full of dead trees (“gunk holes,” as my colleague says). Wading is also difficult, because the bottom is incredibly mucky,” is how Burchsted described the situation.

It’s well-known that beaver ponds are important for the New Hampshire’s ecosystem, since they’re rich in nutrients and organic material, and are home to a variety of invertebrates, fish and birds, but even a very basic fact like how many fish live in them is hard to obtain, she said.

The easiest method to determine fish populations is electroshocking, in which fish in part of a stream or lake are stunned by an electric charge and float to the surface for easy counting. That doesn’t work in a cluttered beaver pond, because the stunned fish get caught on all the woody debris. As a result, most beaver-pond population data depends on traps, which can be inaccurate.

Enter the GoPro:

She looked at these small, rugged cameras, best known for their use in making action-filled “selfie” films while skiing, kayaking or mountain climbing, and liked the idea. She knew that one of her students, Mike McGuinness, liked fishing so she thought he’d be just the person to splash through the muck and water, and experiment with ways of placing GoPro cameras in the wild.

“He spent a summer out in the field and looked for fish in beaver ponds with a GoPro camera. It was so much more successful than I would have imagined … There were more than twice as many fish we caught on camera as compared to traps. Not just numbers, but species. With a trap we would get one species, with a camera we’d get three or four,” she said. “We had to develop new methods to count them, there were so many.”

They collected underwater video more than 100 times at sites along 12 rivers and streams in New Hampshire, with an “in-channel” beaver pond having by far the highest number and diversity of fish.

“Some of our favorite videos show fish swimming in and out of a minnow trap, as though there were almost no barrier,” she said – a reflection of why trap data are suspect.

Yes, because seeing something is almost always better than counting it.  Think for a moment of all the bogus data saying fish don’t do well near beaver dams. I’m guessing there are lots of variables responsible for the mistake, but this well might be one. Too bad Denise thinks we have to find out how to do this in a beaver-free world.

Interestingly, Burchsted, whose pre-academic life as an engineer involved helping remove human dams to improve river systems, admits she isn’t all that interested in fish and frogs and aquatic bugs: “I am more interested in the nonliving parts” of the environment. But you can’t understand the nonliving parts without understanding what the living parts do to them, hence this research.

What she really wants to accomplish, she said, is to understand how beaver ponds work so we can re-create their benefits in urban environments without having to import beavers, which will promptly fill in all our culverts.

“Beaver ponds are a part of the river system that was here before Europeans, and we want to know what functions they provide, how they contribute to the nutrient cycling,” she said.

“We’re trying to get a handle on what types of functions they are providing – what can we do to provide some of these functions that we’ve lost, that the beavers would be providing for us. (We want) kind of a recipe for what we can do to create more of these places, to support all of the life stages of in-stream habitat, not just fish.”

That’s why she thinks one of the most interesting videos collected by the GoPro “comes from urban Keene, where we see a relatively high density of fish … and a high species richness. It seems possible that these urban locations would provide habitat similar to a beaver pond.”

Pretty cool. But this is science, so it’s not that simple.

Burchsted said the GoPro project was a “proof of concept” and now she’s developing methods and processes to establish its bona fides. She needs to show that the results weren’t a lucky accident but a better reflection of what is going on in these ponds, which provides other researchers confidence in the results.

Okay, good job Denise et al. Now lets do a bunch more research projects showing what happens in beaver ponds, only lets do some of them with folks who want the actual beavers, okay? It’s a mad, mad, world when people who observe beaver benefits don’t want them, and people who study the effect of beavers on fish can’t see the benefits.

But still, baby steps, right?