A new study about the targeted use of beaver dams to restore rivers hit the airwaves this week and it has made a flurry of headlines across the country. On Monday I was contacted by an LA Times journalist about whether beavers could work their magic in southern California.

Or more specifically, REINTRODUCED beavers. As in beavers we specifically place on the landscape. Not beavers that get their naturally.

As near as I can tell the dramatic reception comes from the fact that the study is authored by the collaboration of Fairfax and Stanford. And in my estimation when Stanford publishes anything it gets calamitous attention.

Even though to my mind nothing about the findings are in any way surprising or new. As Horatio would say:

“There needs no ghost come from the grave to tell us that!”

Strategically bringing back beavers could support healthy and climate-resilient watersheds

Equipped with findings from a new study published in Communications Earth & Environment, a team of researchers from Stanford and the University of Minnesota aims to ensure that beavers return to or establish new homes in areas with the biggest bang for their buck.

The research reveals some of the factors that determine how well beavers can function within a given watershed. The findings could inform decisions about how to manage habitats, wildlife, and waterways.

“Our findings can help land managers figure out where beaver activity will have the biggest impact,” said lead study author Luwen Wan, a postdoctoral fellow in Earth system science at the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability and the Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence.

Um okay. Use satellites to identify the places where beavers could help streams and then apply them onto the landscape like antiseptic and band-aids.

You know that’s not how this works, don’t you?

“It gives them a practical tool for using nature to solve water and climate problems.”

Although beavers often receive a bad reputation when their dams flood a farmer’s field or block drainage from a busy highway, their dynamic and rapid dam construction makes them superheroes in natural watershed management.

Beaver dams create cool ponds that foster biodiversity, improve water quality, and even limit the spread of wildfires. They frequently construct multiple dams within an area, creating a wetland network of surface water and vegetation known as “beaver wetland complexes.”

These complexes provide long-term freshwater storage and recharge groundwater—a crucial benefit, especially in the American West, where dwindling surface water supplies are the result of years of sustained climate change-driven drought and over-allocation of surface water supplies, as seen in the Upper Colorado River Basin.

“Beavers are naturally doing a lot of the things that we try to do as humans to manage river corridors,” said study senior author Kate Maher, a professor of Earth system science at the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability and a senior fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment.

Maher and Wan collaborated with Emily Fairfax, a beaver expert at the University of Minnesota who has mapped beaver dams through topographic surveys and remote sensing imagery for years. However, traditional surveys in remote areas limit the scale and detail needed to holistically map beaver ponds and their impact on hydrology and ecology. Additionally, dams and ponds are often too small for satellite imagery to capture.

I don’t know whether to be delighted or offended by the fact that it took Stanford this long to find out that beavers help rivers. I guess I should welcome them to the team.

The team’s research highlights the possibility of achieving dual benefits by relocating so-called “nuisance beavers” to watersheds with the capacity to support a beaver population and maximize the natural benefits beavers create.

Just so you know, there are no nuisance beavers. There are no good beavers. There are just BEAVERS.

Shh this is my favorite part:

Their approach allowed the researchers to link pond size to unique landscape features like topography, vegetation, climate, soil characteristics, and stream hydrology. For instance, they found that longer dams were correlated with larger ponds, which in turn could increase ecosystem benefits like cooler local air temperatures and more fish habitat.

GET OUT! You mean to tell me that longer dams are associated with bigger ponds????? No wayyyyy, next thing you’ll be suggesting that heavier items weigh more and deeper snow takes longer to melt!