Category: Beavers and climate change

THANK HEAVENS FOR EMILY

heidi08 Beavers and climate change July 2, 2020

The world isn’t done blaming beavers for climate change, so there are a few more science articles bemoaning the dam beavers and permafrost. But at least one of them talked to Emily Fairfax yesterday so we’re mighty happy about that. This is from Popular Science.

Beavers might be making the Arctic melt even faster

Carbon pollution is causing all sorts of weird effects on the planet, including dramatic weather shifts and reshuffling ecosystems. Every day brings a new surprise driven by the cascading impacts of warming the Earth. Now, a new study in Environmental Research Letters shows that a warming climate may have unleashed beavers upon the tundra in the Alaskan Arctic—and their activities could be accelerating the loss of permafrost.

In Alaska and Canada, beavers have mostly made their homes in forests. But things are changing. Summers are longer, seasonal winter ice is thinner, and shrubs are increasingly sprouting up, making the tundra an increasingly appealing place for the rodents. In recent years, researchers have documented beavers setting up their dams in these treeless landscapes, and more lakes are now pocketing the tundra.

Okay this part we know. Where’s the inspiring new Emily part?

However, it’s important to note that the research team did not directly link increased permafrost thawing to beaver ponds. More watery surface area across the tundra is known to chip away at permafrost—that’s not in dispute. But Emily Fairfax, an ecohydrologist at California State University Channel Islands, says that you can’t apply that same relationship to beaver ponds. Instead, most beaver-created water bodies tend to be shallow, and thus are more likely to completely freeze over during winter, which would prevent a significant loss of permafrost. In a calculation based on typical beaver dam heights and winter temperatures in the study region, Fairfax argues that the majority of beaver ponds in the study area probably freeze through in winter and “are behaving more like shallow wetlands that go through freeze-thaw cycles just like the active layer of permafrost does.” Adds Fairfax, “The scale of impact the authors imply is overstated.”

Even if beavers are causing some extra melting, it’s hard to say how that would ultimately factor into how much soil carbon is stored or lost. As Fairfax points out, beaver ponds can retain water from thawed permafrost that would otherwise drain away. Dried permafrost soils, meanwhile, are highly flammable—and, if ignited, can release lots of carbon into the atmosphere.

And no scientist is saying we should be mad at beavers, which are known to provide many benefits to their native ecosystems.

SPECULATION BY SATELLITE STUDY

We all know beavers are blamed for everything. For floods and droughts and giardiasis and crop failure. Well if you have even one friend who knows you like beavers you received a panicked copy of some version of this article yesterday. Because apparently they cause climate change too.

The Newest Threat to a Warming Alaskan Arctic: Beavers

The large rodents are creating lakes that accelerate the thawing of frozen soils and potentially increase greenhouse gas emissions, a study finds.

Alaskan beavers are carving out a growing web of channels, dams and ponds in the frozen Arctic tundra of northwestern Alaska, helping to turn it into a soggy sponge that intensifies global warming.

On the Baldwin Peninsula, near Kotzebue, for example, the big rodents have been so busy that they’re hastening the regional thawing of the permafrost, raising new concerns about how fast those organic frozen soils will melt and release long-trapped greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, said scientists who are studying the beavers’ activity.

The number of new beaver dams and lakes continues to grow exponentially, suggesting that “beavers are a greater influence than climate on surface water extent,” said University of Alaska, Fairbanks scientist Ken Tape, a co-author of a new beaver and permafrost study published today in the journal Environmental Research Letters.

Those rotten beavers. Always going where they’re not wanted. If they weren’t there the permafrost would be melting much slower and we could keep right on pretending climate change wasn’t real!

The bigger and deeper the pools made by the beavers, the warmer the water. The larger pools hold heat longer, which delays refreezing in autumn. Tape said Arctic vegetation, permafrost, hydrology and wildlife are all linked. Even against the backdrop of other recent Arctic global warming extremes, like raging wildfires, record heat waves and dwindling glaciers and sea ice, the impact of beavers stands out, he said.

“It’s not gradual change,” he said. “It’s like hitting the landscape with a hammer.”

“And it’s a continual change that the Arctic is just not used to,” he added.

Ooof! Hitting the artic landscape with a hammer! Good lord what a vivid image. Don’t you just hate those rotten beavers. What happens to the ruined landscape after they work their nasty will? Does it just sit there with those ponds festering?

No it does not.

Another way to see them is as “agents of Arctic adaptation,” said Ben Goldfarb, author of a recent natural history book that shows how beavers could help many other species, including humans, survive the era of rapid, human-caused climate change.

“Beavers create fantastic habitat for all kinds of species, like songbirds and moose,” Goldfarb said. “All of those species are moving northward because of climate change, and beavers are preparing the way.” As a habitat-creating keystone species, beavers are also important food for wolves, and recent research shows that beaver ponds are good at keeping carbon locked up, he added.

Beavers may even hold the key to survival for some salmon species that are losing their streams to global warming and other changes farther south.

“We’re losing salmon in other places. If they’re going to shift their climate envelope, they’re probably going to need beavers to help them,” Goldfarb said.

Thank god for Ben. What would we ever do without him? I just want to fire him at these articles like a water canon and hope he puts the stupid out. He won’t of course. You know that someone somewhere is going to propose we just KILL all the beavers and problem solved, no more CLIMATE CHANGE!

If beavers are the primary drivers of permafrost degradation on the Baldwin Peninsula, that has wider implications for tracking surface area changes across similar parts of the Arctic where beavers may advance, he said.

In lowland Arctic regions, the basins favored by beavers can account for 50 to 80 percent of the landscape. Currently, more than 10,000 beaver dams have been mapped across northwestern Alaska and that data is being used in models to pinpoint the impacts of the new water bodies on permafrost and the carbon cycle.

Permafrost researcher Merrit Turetsky, director of the University of Colorado, Boulder’s Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research, said it’s not yet clear how beaver impacts may affect regional-scale carbon cycles, but that it’s ” important to pay attention to all ecosystem-engineers such as the beaver.”

Yeah yeah yeah. Those darn carbon based beavers. WIth their greenhouses gasses ruining everything. Here’s what Emily Fairfax had to say about this research.

Really frustrated to read this CNN article and the study that it is based on. Seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding of what beaver ponds are and are not. They are not the same as big arctic lakes. The study includes no actual measurements of permafrost degradation.

It’s 100% possible, and likely, that large beaver ponds that are not freezing thru in winter are accelerating permafrost degradation. I’m not arguing w/ that. Degradation happens when water bodies don’t freeze thru in winter & keep relatively warm water on the land surface. 2/n

But the study doesn’t measure pond depth. Or dam height. Or actual changes in permafrost structure/hydrology. They just measure number of beaver dams and pond surface area over time. They accurately showed that beavers are moving into the arctic. 3/n

But it doesn’t show how many of those ponds are staying unfrozen year round. Primary dams tend to be taller than secondary dams, and time to freeze thru depends on water depth. Beavers don’t want their primary pond freezing, but are less concerned with secondary ponds. 4/n

In a typical landscape, 80-85% of dams are going to be secondary dams. Shorter dams. Shallower ponds. These will probably freeze thru in the high arctic! There are simple 1D models for lake ice thickness to see how long it takes to freeze to a given depth for a given climate.

Of course there are no measurements. This entire study is speculation by satellite. They don’t want to get their boots all mucky. But here’s one final parting thought from Emily.

Know what releases a huge amount of greenhouse gasses? Wildfire in the arctic. Maybe the beavers are helping by keeping the ground wet even during summer. Maybe not. We don’t know without collecting the relevant data.

Sure humans are causing climate change and ruining the permafrost. But beavers are making it faster! Now the BP trucks can’t even drive across the tundra three months of the year! How can they keep making money hand over fist? I ask you.

“LEAVING HEALTHIER, MORE RESILIENT HABITATS IN THEIR WAKE”

heidi08 Beavers and climate change, Beavers and Fire Prevention May 28, 2020

Feeling nostalgic? Time again for that age-old question, this time delivered by the big guns at the National Resources Defense Council. Same tune but different baritone. We’re ready for this. The planet is ready for this.

The Humble Beaver: Troublemaker or Climate Superhero?

Beavers create rich habitats and act as buffers against the effects of drought and wildfire—spurring efforts to pinpoint new ways to help us coexist with North America’s largest rodent.

At one point along the road that runs parallel to Lost Creek is a culvert that drains runoff from the mountainous terrain. There, beavers felled nearby aspen and other trees and set about constructing a dam in front of the culvert. With the pipe blocked, the water level behind the dam rose. “They have made these really beautiful ponds on one side of the road,” says beaver expert Elissa Chott. The deep water ensures the entrance tunnels leading to the beaver lodge—built of sticks, mud, and rocks—remain beneath the surface, providing protection from predators. And the large expanse of water offers easy access to the fresh leaves, stems, and bark that the vegetarians consume.

But what the beavers considered as the perfect place to build a home, the land managers at Lost Creek considered a nuisance. The rodents so effectively blocked the culvert that their ponds flooded the road. So the officials called Chott, who heads up the Beaver Conflict Resolution pilot project. A joint partnership formed last year between the Montana-based Clark Fork Coalition, National Wildlife Federation, and Defenders of Wildlife, the project aims to help public and private landowners find nonlethal solutions for dealing with problematic beaver.

There are ample reasons for people and North America’s largest rodent to learn to better coexist as these mammals rebound across the West. Beavers manipulate the landscape for their own purposes, but mounting evidence shows that the marshy expanses they create may act as a buffer against drought and wildfire, both of which climate change is exacerbating. Myriad other species benefit from the efforts of the industrious rodents too. Algae and aquatic plants thrive in their ponds and provide nourishment for fish, birds, and mammals. One study found 50 percent more species in beaver-built ponds than in other wetlands in the same area. When the beavers eventually exhaust their woody food supply, they move to a new location—but even then, the ecosystems they’ve engineered continue to give back. Their abandoned dams and ponds leak and drain, in turn giving rise to lush, grassy meadows that draw nesting songbirds and other animals.

Got that? AMPLE REASONS. Hurray for the beaver conflict resolution project. I wish ever state had a beaver task force! And here comes Emily.

Some of those benefits are still being revealed. Emily Fairfax, an ecohydrologist at California State University Channel Islands, has found that the clever creatures are creating wetlands uniquely resistant to drought and wildland fire. She has mapped an estimated 5,000 dams in California, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, Washington, and Wyoming using satellite imagery. Using remote sensing, she compared how a drought or a fire affects the quality of the vegetation in areas with dams versus similar stretches without them. “It’s very clear that beavers keep things green,” she said. In contrast, in the undammed riparian zones she studied, the drought-ravaged landscapes had far less vegetation.

Fairfax is working to find ways to get higher-resolution imagery so she can tease apart what may make beaver-shaped landscapes better able to withstand the effects of climate change. Ultimately, she’d like to devise a tool for land managers to use when considering their resident rodents—an empirical model, perhaps, that would allow them to determine the number of beavers or dams needed to see an appreciable fire- or drought-buffering effect. After all, she notes, many land managers who encounter beavers are already searching for ways to help recharge groundwater and nurture native vegetation. But “because beavers were absent for so long, they don’t understand how the beavers fit into that [work].” As a result, they continue to resort to trapping or removing beavers, she says.

But “what if we could provide a number?” Fairfax asks. “If you could say that having X number of beavers is going to preserve 900 acres of wetlands during fire, and that should hold true for 70 percent of likely fires,” would that change attitudes toward beavers?

Oooh I know how many! As many as they dam well want! Beavers have a knack for this sort of thing. They know how many will fit in an area. Trust them.

Today, thankfully, conservationists no longer need to resort to such extreme measures as dropping beavers from the sky to help their populations recover. Instead, they’re watching the paddle-tailed architects slowly move back into the streams where their ancestors lived, carrying on the compulsion to stop the drip drip drip of gentle water flows, and leaving healthier, more resilient habitats in their wake.

Oooh that may be my favorite line in this whole article. Emily’s research is making peoples heads hurt. They want a buffer for fires so badly, but god dam does it HAVE to be beavers? Honestly? Anything but beavers. They haaaaaaaaaaaaaate beavers. I’ve always said it was like telling men you could cure impotence with feminism. Does ut gave to be beavers?

Yes. Yes it does.

THE GOLDEN STATE NEEDS ITS BEAVERS

heidi08 Beavers, Beavers and climate change, Beavers and water May 23, 2020

With the dire consequences of climate change unfolding around the world, its a good time to remind everyone that beavers can help. Okay, maybe not with the virus BUT in most of the other ways. I guess beavers have some pretty important work to do ahead of them. Maybe we should think of them as allies in the fight and get the hell out of their way?

Lets start with a visit to our friends at Phys.org, shall we?

Less water could sustain more Californians if we make every drop count

California isn’t running out of water,” says Richard Luthy. “It’s running out of cheap water. But the state can’t keep doing what it’s been doing for the past 100 years.”

Luthy knows. As a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford, as well as director of a National Science Foundation center to re-invent urban water supply (known as ReNUWIt), he has spent decades studying the state’s metropolitan areas.

In a new journal article, he argues that California cities can no longer rely on their three traditional water-coping strategies: over-drafting groundwater, depleting streams and importing water from far away. His analysis focuses on several strategies that, taken together, can help cities provide for their growing population with prudent public policies and investments:

Ya know, I think I heard once about this big rodent that works its entire life to save water. What was that called again?

Billions of gallons of storm water simply pour into the ocean annually. That needs to change, Luthy says. California’s coastal cities were historically engineered to flush out storm water to reduce flooding, but today cities want to capture as much as possible and put it to use. Los Angeles already gets 10% of its water from storm water runoff, and hopes to more than double that by 2035. Like potable reuse, however, storm water capture often requires big investments in pipes, storage sites and treatment facilities. The capital costs of such infrastructure vary widely, depending on local conditions. But the median project cost is often cheaper than costs to import water in the future, even assuming it will be available, Luthy says.

Wow. If only there were some way to STOP THAT WATER from flowing downstream to the ocean all over the united states in every city and town. It wouldn’t take a big dam if there were LOTS AND LOTS of little ones.

Can think of a way to get lots of little dams built in every stream in America? I can.

GUEST COMMENTARY: Leave it to Beavers: significant partners in dealing with climate change

Guest commentary by Gail Sredanovic in consultation with Heidi Perryman

Think a babbling clear stream is the only healthy one? Think again. Once hunted almost to extinction, beaver were once much, much more numerous, and their ponds and wetlands created a very different waterscape of a kind far better adapted to climate change and drought. There is abundant research to document this. Here is what the Water Institute of the Occidental Art and Ecology Center has to say:

Gail is a long time supporter and reader of this blog for many years. She’s the reason the beaver festival in 2013 was visited by the Raging Grannies from the southbay as she was their lyricist. She’s a firm believer in beaver works, and a dedicated conservationist.

“Extensive research has recently heightened recognition of the important role beaver (Castor canadensis) can play in watershed health and climate change resiliency. The species’ ecological services include enhanced water storage, erosion control, habitat restoration and creation, listed species recovery, the maintenance of stream flows during the dry summer period, and other beneficial adaptations to our changing climate conditions.

While this keystone species has created valuable wetland habitat across California for centuries, beaver are often overlooked or maligned. Other western states are taking a pro-active stance towards beaver restoration, but agencies and landowners in California are focused on managing beaver as a nuisance rather than stewarding them for their benefits.”

Reminding millions of climate activists that beavers save water ain’t too shabby, Thanks, Gail.

The Water Institute has a booklet which you can order or view online to gain a better understanding of the history of beaver in California and how, through better stewardship, we can partner with them to fight floods, wildfires, drought and extinction, while mitigating potential damage. Anyone concerned about the future of water in California should take this seriously. Check out also the abundant information on the website martinezbeavers.org/wordpress or consult Ben Goldfarb’s very readable, Eager, the Surprising Secret Life of Beavers and Why they Matter.

Thank you Gail! California needs beavers, and you did a great job reminding us why.

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HAMMERS WITH GIARDIA?

heidi08 Beavers and climate change May 5, 2020

That’s how beavers are seen as in the Tundra.

Just waddling giardia distribution systems that ruin the ice for snow mobiles and kill all the fish.

Beavers are booming in some parts of the Arctic — and speeding up changes to the tundra

`As the Arctic warms and woody shrubs take root in what was once open tundra, animals more common to the boreal forest are taking advantage of the transformation. Some of those newcomers, it turns out, are themselves exacerbating the transformation caused by warming.

In less than two decades, beavers swarming one area of Arctic Alaska have increased the number of dams by about 5,000 percent, according to a newly published study that uses satellite imagery to track the changes. Over the same period, the study found an increase in surface water in the areas, especially in water bodies where beavers built their dams.

The study isn’t the first in Alaska to document such changes. In 2018, scientists working in the same area found that the spread of beavers into the tundra was

“like hitting the landscape with a hammer.”

You know how beavers are. Just exactly like hammers. Hammers that bring more fish and frogs and birds. Banging away at wood and constructing things. What on earth does that particular metaphor even mean in this case? I could see how taking a hammer to glass would be bad, or even a Renoir or a Porsche. But a Landscape? How do you hurt a landscape with a hammer? And more importantly, if you’re goal was to destroy a landscape would a hammer be your weapon of choice?

I can only assume he means a frozen landscape? And beavers shatter that wall of ice with their waterworks? But may be thinking too reasonably. He may just be saying something insane.

In the area covered by the new study, a 100-square-kilometer section around the hub community of Kotzebue on the Chukchi Sea coast in Northwest Alaska, the number of dams jumped from two in 2002 to 98 in 2019 — and the amount of surface water increased by 8.3 percent in the same period, according to the study. About two-thirds of that increase in the surface area came from water bodies influenced by beavers and their woody structures, the study found.

The result, in the words of lead author Ben Jones of the University of Alaska Fairbanks, is “beaver-driven engineering.”

“Once beavers come onto the scene, they have the ability to really influence the surfacewater systems,” he said.

You know. Just like Hammers. I’ve always said that a colony of beavers is just about a smart as a bag of hammers.

The beavers’ presence has spurred complaints from people in the region — chiefly about impacts to boat travel and, when terrain gets flooded, impacts to travel by snowmobile.

There are also worries about beavers’ effects on fish. But those can be mixed, Tape said. Research on Lower 48 beavers shows more positives than negatives for fish habitat, he noted. It is still too early to judge the effects in Arctic Alaska, but there may be an enhancement of fish diversity, with better conditions for fish like salmon, though a reduction in quality of habitat for Arctic-specialist species.

Water quality is also a concern. The intestinal malady Giardiasis, caused by parasite infection, even bears the nickname “beaver fever,” Giardiasis risks are increasing as beavers and muskrats expand northward, Alaska health experts have warned.

My God people complain about beavers. And they complain a LOT. You can almost imagine some old crochety prospector in a patched cabin on the tundra with just two of his own teeth saying “I moved North in ’23 dagnabbit to get AWAY from those varmints!!!”

And now they’ve moved in. Too bad. Get ready for a whole lot of improvements to come your way. First plants, then animals, the fish. Something like this but slower.