Please join with 250 non-profit organizations, scientists and advocates who submitted this letter to President Biden on February 27, 2023 asking for an Executive Order to protect beaver on our federally managed public lands as a proactive emergency climate response!
This petition will close on May 31, 2023 and be prepared for submission to the Biden Administration.
Ending beaver trapping and hunting on our federally managed public lands is a nature-based climate solution that will help restore many of our streams and wetlands, and bring real, tangible benefits to our communities.
Drought, floods, wildfires, and crashing fish and wildlife populations are no longer confined to small areas but spill across state boundaries. State wildlife agencies have failed to act in our best collective interest as they continue to narrowly focus on select recreational user groups even as our human and wild communities are increasingly stressed by the accelerating impacts of climate change and biodiversity loss. It is time for action at the national level.
Benefits include: More dependable water for cities, towns, farms and ranches; natural water filtration systems resulting in improved water quality; natural firebreaks creating refuges for wildlife during wildfires and protecting water quality post fire; temporary surface and groundwater storage that dampens flood peaks and improves stream flows during droughts; abundant quality fish and wildlife habitat; and drawdown of atmospheric carbon as wetland habitat expands.
Beavers can help us meet the challenges before us but only if we protect them. It is time to ask the President to take action as a matter of national security. Time is of the essence.
Matt Kaminski stood on a road scarcely higher than the floodplain, glassy pools on all sides stretched out like something from a dream. In the distance, a storm lumbered over the Coast Ranges.
The marsh all around him, Kaminski said, was a window into the Central Valley’s past. Back then, the waterways that twist down from the Sierra Nevada mountains would flood unrestricted by the current thicket of dams, canals and levees.
The more you know about rivers, the less confidence you have in a mapmaker’s static squiggle. Kaminski, a biologist from Ducks Unlimited who helps oversee the floodplain and, when it dries out, the grasslands, explained that when “the state of California was wild, it had a lot more wetlands.”
During the rainiest years, the whole valley could transform into an enormous, shallow sea. Floodwaters would spread over the landscape and percolate through the soil into the aquifers beneath. Little aquatic creatures would make their home in the tules and migrating birds would stop to gorge on their long journeys in the spring and fall. The Valley oaks and Fremont cottonwoods would rise, improbably, out of the shallows.
That appeared to be happening just east of Gustine in Merced County, as yet another storm from the tropics approached the valley: The San Joaquin River seemed to spread out and create an ephemeral wetland, a natural process.
But Kaminski pointed to the edge of the water, where three concrete slabs jutted into the marsh, and little slats of wood controlled the flow under the dirt road to the other side.
This marsh hadn’t flooded on its own.
Instead, the wetland was an artifice on top of an artifice. Powerful California interests “reclaimed” the Central Valley’s wetlands in the 19th and early 20th centuries, draining them for agricultural use and transforming the landscape.
The vast majority of the state’s marshes are gone.
But in little pockets in the state, people like Kaminski are reworking the land yet again to bring back a version of California’s past, in service of the future. By allowing rivers to spread out, flows are diverted from downstream communities, replenishing groundwater and staving off unwanted floods.
“These wetlands,” Kaminski likes to say, “act as a sponge.”
And the state agreed. In September, the California Wildlife Conservation Board earmarked $40 million for the nonprofit River Partners to spend on similar projects in the San Joaquin Valley.
But in the governor’s proposed budget released in January, that funding was axed. The news came early in the procession of climate-change-fueled winter storms that have led to staggering snowpack in the Sierra, extensive flooding throughout the state and more than 30 deaths. Facing a budget shortfall, Gov. Gavin Newsom had moved to kneecap efforts to use the historical floodplain as a way to recharge groundwater and to prevent disasters in human-occupied areas.
“In the San Joaquin Valley, we’ve got a product pipeline of about $200 million worth of floodplain expansion projects that are ready to go,” said Julie Rentner, president of River Partners. But the proposed budget, she said, “has zero dollars to be used towards that pipeline.”
Rentner said that habitat restoration cannot wait.
Well I certainly agree that habitat restoration cannot wait! But I still don’t understand why they didn’t mention our potential to do much of this fixing up for free? We’re certainly at work in the San Joaquin River Ecological Reserve! We got some good press on the BBC though:
The Tulocay Creek Beaver Lodge was partialy submerged during a big storm and Beavers had to find refuge during the day. One Beaver Kit was resting on top of the lodge during the middle of the day. The dams were mostly swept away.
Creek with lots of vegetation pre-storm
Most of the cattails were swept away during the high water flows
Beaver Lodge pre-storm.
After the high water flows receded the Beaver Lodge had partially collapsed and the Beaver Pond water level was very low as the Beaver Dam had washed away.
Main Beaver Dam partially washed away and breached. Pond level way down.
Beaver swims against the flow of storm water to get back to lodge
Credit: UT Jackson School of Geosciences/ National Center for Health Statistics/ USDA Forest Service.
A new species of ancient beaver that was rediscovered by researchers in The University of Texas at Austin’s fossil collections has been named after Buc-ee’s, a Texas-based chain of popular travel centers known for its cartoon beaver mascot. The beaver is called Anchitheriomys buceei, or “A. buceei” for short. Steve May, a research associate at the UT Jackson School of Geosciences, said that the beaver’s Texas connection and a chance encounter with a Buc-ee’s billboard are what inspired the name.
May is the lead author of the paper that describes A. buceei, along with another, much smaller, species of fossil beaver. Published in the journal Palaeontologia Electronica, the paper provides an overview of beaver occurrences along the Texas Gulf Coast from 15 million to 22 million years ago based on bones and archival records in the UT collections.
While driving down a highway in 2020, May spotted a Buc-ee’s billboard that said “This is Beaver Country.” The phrase brought to mind the Texas beaver fossils he had been studying at UT’s Texas Vertebrate Paleontology Collections.
“I thought, ‘Yeah, it is beaver country, and it has been for millions of years,'” May said.
A. buceei lived in Texas about 15 million years ago. To the casual observer, it probably wouldn’t have looked much different from beavers living in Texas today, according to study co-author Matthew Brown, the director of the Jackson School’s vertebrate paleontology collections. However, one key difference is size. A. buceei was bigger—about 30% larger than modern beavers—though still much smaller than the bear-size beavers that lived in North America during the last Ice Age.
The UT collections includes A. buceei fossils from six Texas sites. But most of what researchers know about the new fossil beaver comes from a unique partial skull from Burkeville, Texas. The fossil is a fusion of bone and brain cast that was created when sediment naturally seeped into the beaver’s brain cavity eons ago, creating a rock replica of the brain as the specimen fossilized.
See the rest of the article. And there is another bit of news on PHYS-ORG that might lessen concerns about the greenhouse gas produced in wetlands.
Annual mean near-surface air temperature response to methane, decomposed into (a) longwave and shortwave effects; (b) longwave effects only; and (c) shortwave effects only. Credit: Robert Allen/UCR
Most climate models do not yet account for a new UC Riverside discovery: methane traps a great deal of heat in Earth’s atmosphere, but also creates cooling clouds that offset 30% of the heat. Greenhouse gases like methane create a kind of blanket in the atmosphere, trapping heat from Earth’s surface, called longwave energy, and preventing it from radiating out into space. This makes the planet hotter.
“A blanket doesn’t create heat, unless it’s electric. You feel warm because the blanket inhibits your body’s ability to send its heat into the air. This is the same concept,” explained Robert Allen, UCR assistant professor of Earth sciences.
In addition to absorbing longwave energy, it turns out methane also absorbs incoming energy from the sun, known as shortwave energy. “This should warm the planet,” said Allen, who led the research project. “But counterintuitively, the shortwave absorption encourages changes in clouds that have a slight cooling effect.”
This effect is detailed in the journal Nature Geoscience, alongside a second finding that the research team did not fully expect. Though methane generally increases the amount of precipitation, accounting for the absorption of shortwave energy suppresses that increase by 60%.
Both types of energy—longwave (from Earth) and shortwave (from sun)—escape from the atmosphere more than they are absorbed into it. The atmosphere needs compensation for the escaped energy, which it gets from heat created as water vapor condenses into rain, snow, sleet, or hail.
“Essentially, precipitation acts as a heat source, making sure the atmosphere maintains a balance of energy,” said study co-author Ryan Kramer, a researcher at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.
Methane changes this equation. By holding on to energy from the sun, methane is introducing heat the atmosphere no longer needs to get from precipitation.
Additionally, methane shortwave absorption decreases the amount of solar radiation reaching Earth’s surface. This in turn reduces the amount of water that evaporates. Generally, precipitation and evaporation are equal, so a decrease in evaporation leads to a decrease in precipitation.
“This has implications for understanding in more detail how methane and perhaps other greenhouses gases can impact the climate system,” Allen said. “Shortwave absorption softens the overall warming and rain-increasing effects but does not eradicate them at all.”
. . .
Scientific interest in methane has increased in recent years as levels of emissions have increased. Much comes from industrial sources, as well as from agricultural activities and landfill. Methane emissions are also likely to increase as frozen ground underlying the Arctic begins to thaw.
Regardless of our contribution to the atmosphere, as the first article shows, we beaver folks have been at this for a very long time. It’s your recent behavior that’s causing the problems! Check out the report.
Main Beaver Dam partially washed away and breached. Pond level way down.
