You could go to college, sit thru boring classes, study for exams, earn a degree and owe millions of dollars afterwards OR you could just read this website for free every day and be a genius! Since I already did the first one, I’m committed now to the second. This arrived yesterday from USFS hydrologist Dr. Suzanne Fouty who let me know she will actually be retiring in March. (The forest service will be lost without her, but I’m selfishly hoping that all that free time means she will come to the beaver festival!)
Anyway, she sent a presentation that was given at a conference last year in Washington that I know will interest you folks. The author is Konrad Halen of Utah State. Click here for full text of the paper or here for a link to his slides.
“To What Extent Might Beaver Dam Building Buffer Water Storage Losses Associated with a Declining Snowpack?”
Konrad worked with Joe Wheaton to study this issue. .The question addressed was whether an increase in beaver dams could make up for the effects of climate change on the receeding snow pack. The author looked at the number of dams and calculated the volume of water behind each. Then he did the same with the volume of the snow pack in a prior year. 
The results are kind of depressing in that they indicate that climate change is going to kick the snot out of our water supply and beavers can only help a little bit.
What he found is that beaver dam amount for a small fraction of overall snowpack water, but that they do indeed contribute. I guess the moral of the story is “Don’t screw up your climate!” And if it so happens that you are so stupid you do mess up your climate, then the moral is “You better have a LOT of beavers around to do what they can.”
Beavers can’t hit the undo button for us, but they CAN HELP if we let them. That should be foremost on our minds when we think about what to do when they block a culvert or flood a basement.
The next educational moment of the day is from Eli Asarian of River Bend Sciences who let me know about an upcoming discussion of the surprise beavers in the artic that we might be able to attend for free.
It’s an upcoming Webinar entitled
Tundra Be Dammed! The Beaver Colonization of the Artic
The next Northern Region, Alaska Section, AWRA Monthly Brown Bag Presentation will be given by Dr. Ken Tape, University of Alaska Fairbanks – Water and Environmental Research Center, on “Tundra Be Dammed: Beaver Colonization of the Arctic”. We will also have this presentation available for Free over the web (using Webex). Please see the following URL for more information. The role of beavers on the hydrologic landscape has always been significant in North America. Ken’s presentation on changes in the Arctic has relevence to potential changes across North America. Please join us next week and enjoy an informative presentation on Alaska.
The American Water Resource Association does monthly brown bags in Fairbanks and allows for remote participation through its webinars. To participate contract them here. I’m pretty curious about what gets said about these permafrost-ruining beavers in the Tundra, so maybe I’ll see you there!
