You know how you have some project that you’re working on, with little success. And you try one thing. Then you try the other thing. But nothing seems to make a dent in the problem. And sometimes you feel like it’s hopeless and you might as well just give up and go do something else entirely. And then something GIVES and all of a sudden success just falls into place all around you and you feel the ground shifting between your feet in a good way?
Well, this feels a little like that.
Simple hand-built structures can help streams survive wildfires and drought
Many of the wetlands in the western United States have disappeared since the 1700s. California has lost an astonishing 90 percent of its wetlands, which includes streamsides, wet meadows and ponds. In Nevada, Idaho and Colorado, more than 50 percent of wetlands have vanished. Precious wet habitats now make up just 2 percent of the arid West — and those remaining wet places are struggling.
Nearly half of U.S. streams are in poor condition, unable to fully sustain wildlife and people, says Jeremy Maestas, a sagebrush ecosystem specialist with the NRCS who organized that workshop on Wilde’s ranch in 2016. As communities in the American West face increasing water shortages, more frequent and larger wildfires (SN: 9/26/20, p. 12) and unpredictable floods, restoring ailing waterways is becoming a necessity.
You’ll want to click on the headline and read every word over and over. This article is that good.
Landowners and conservation groups are bringing in teams of volunteers and workers, like the NRCS group, to build low-cost solutions from sticks and stones. And the work is making a difference. Streams are running longer into the summer, beavers and other animals are returning, and a study last December confirmed that landscapes irrigated by beaver activity can resist wildfires.
Bring back the beaver and let them do the work. Thanks Joe Wheaton for making this and a million other articles like this possible.
Filling the sponge
Think of a floodplain as a sponge: Each spring, floodplains in the West soak up snow melting from the mountains. The sponge is then wrung out during summer and fall, when the snow is gone and rainfall is scarce. The more water that stays in the sponge, the longer streams can flow and plants can thrive. A full sponge makes the landscape better equipped to handle natural disasters, since wet places full of green vegetation can slow floods, tolerate droughts or stall flames.
Typical modern-day stream and river restoration methods can cost about $500,000 per mile, says Joseph Wheaton, a geomorphologist at Utah State University in Logan. Projects are often complex, and involve excavators and bulldozers to shore up streambanks using giant boulders or to construct brand-new channels.
For smaller streams, hand-built restoration solutions work well, often at one-tenth the cost, Wheaton says, and can be self-sustaining once nature takes over. These low-tech approaches include building beaver dam analogs to entice beavers to stay and get to work, erecting small rock dams or strategically mounding mud and branches in a stream. The goal of these simple structures is to slow the flow of water and spread it across the floodplain to help plants grow and to fill the underground sponge.
Hey I wonder if that would work in California. What a crazy idea. We’re pretty special. Do you think it’s possible?
Fixes like these help cure a common ailment that afflicts most streams out West, including Birch Creek, Wheaton says: Human activities have altered these waterways into straightened channels largely devoid of debris. As a result, most riverscapes flow too straight and too fast.
“They should be messy and inefficient,” he says. “They need more structure, whether it’s wood, rock, roots or dirt. That’s what slows down the water.” Wheaton prefers the term “riverscape” over stream or river because he “can’t imagine a healthy river without including the land around it.”
Natural structures “feed the stream a healthy diet” of natural materials, allowing soil and water to accumulate again in the floodplain, he says.
Even in California? No wayyy…. That hardly seems possible! Hey maybe there should be a summit or something to teach people about this?
Beaver benefits
In watersheds across the West, beavers can be a big part of filling the floodplain’s sponge. The rodents gnaw down trees to create lodges and dams, and dig channels for transporting their logs to the dams. All this work slows down and spreads out the water.
On two creeks in northeastern Nevada, streamsides near beaver dams were up to 88 percent greener than undammed stream sections when measured from 2013 to 2016. Even better, beaver ponds helped maintain lush vegetation during the hottest summer months, even during a multiyear drought, Emily Fairfax, an ecohydrologist at California State University Channel Islands, and geologist Eric Small of University of Colorado Boulder reported in 2018 in Ecohydrology.
“Bringing beavers back just makes good common sense when you get down to the science of it,” Wilde says. He did it on his ranch.
Hell YA it does. Bringing back beavers makes dam good sense for all the places that need water and don’t like fires. This is such awesome news and divine timing. A person given to hyperbole might suddenly be given to exaltations.
Water doesn’t burn
The Sharps Fire that scorched south-central Idaho in July 2018 burned a wide swath of a watershed where Idaho Fish and Game had relocated beavers to restore a floodplain. A strip of wet, green vegetation stood untouched along the beavers’ ponds. Wheaton sent a drone to take photos, tweeting out an image on September 5, 2018: “Why is there an impressive patch of green in the middle of 65,000 acres of charcoal? Turns out water doesn’t burn. Thank you beaver!”
Fairfax, the ecohydrologist who reported that beaver dams increase streamside greenness, had been searching for evidence that beavers could help keep flames at bay. Wheaton’s tweet was a “kick in the pants to push my own research on beavers and fire forward,” she says.
With undergraduate student Andrew Whittle, now at the Colorado School of Mines, Fairfax got to work analyzing satellite imagery from recent wildfires. The two mapped thousands of beaver dams within wildfire-burned areas in several western states. Choosing five fires of varying severity in both shrubland and forested areas, the pair analyzed the data to see if creeks with beaver activity stayed greener than creeks without beavers during wildfires.
I’m breathing into a paper bag but I can’t seem to calm down at all. This is SUCH A GREAT ARTICLE and such good news for beavers. I am beside myself. What a great time to remind people that beavers matter.
Could I possibly be happier? Oh yes I could.
Jon found this yesterday behind Susana park. So yes. It is truly the very best beaver day ever. Oh and for those of you keeping track at home that’s a rock in the dam, a bottle of modela AND a crutch. Because beavers are the original recyclers.
As a couple of self-described “tree hugging dirt worshippers,” Jolliff and Peterman were loathe to cut down any trees on their small woodland property near Scio, Ore., which they have affectionately named “Bogwood.” 
