Don’t you sometimes get the feeling that we’re nickling and diming this beaver thing to death? Chipping away at how beavers are good for salmon, For drought, For flooding. For erosion. For Wildfires. When all the while what we should just be saying is: BEAVERS ARE GOOD!!!
Maybe this is the next step step.’
Beavers can affect wildfires
Their infrastructure raises the water table and creates wetlands used by many other species, and because of their effect on other organisms in the ecosystem, they are considered a keystone species. This storage of water can change the vegetation type as well as the moisture content in the live and dead fuel. Wetlands usually do not burn in a wildfire and they can serve a barrier to its spread.
Well this HAS to make its way to the governor. Don’t you think?
Sio
Sometimes its when you have ZERO IDEA how to solve a problem that you finally take advice from the ones who you’ve been ignoring all this time.
The BeaversandBrush.com website is a not-for-profit publication, “Created by Californians seeking to protect California from wildfire. We can help one another to safety by welcoming back native beavers and traditional prescribed burning of brush.”
Photos from their website show the change in a creek after beavers moved in.
They then go on to talk about Lucy Sherriff’s article in the Sierra club website – the one that I learned yesterday she couldn’t GET THE SMITHSONIAN to pay for or even be interested in. Her article in that magazine was paid for by a grant from SEJ (The society for environmental journalists). Because why on earth would a science magazine pay for information about an ecosystem engineer that can protect the environment?
[Dr. Emily] Fairfax began to carry out the scientific research that she had hoped to find. Using satellite images, she mapped vegetation around beaver territories before, after, and during wildfires (footage of wildfires in progress can show how a fire moves through a landscape). She visited field sites in California, Colorado, Idaho, Oregon, and Wyoming and found sections of creek that did not have beavers were on average more than three times as affected by fire—burning a bigger area—than areas where beavers had built dams.
“I expected some of the time beaver dams would work,” says Fairfax. Instead, she found the presence of beavers had significant effects. “It didn’t matter if it was one pond or 55 ponds in a row. If there were beaver dams, the land was protected from fire. It was incredible.”
Beavers are sending up smoke signals. If we don’t get the message soon it may be too late.
