Category: Beavers and climate change

BEAVERS CAN HELP JEFF BEZOS AND TNC

Well, well, well, What do you know. Amazon is partnering with the Nature Conservancy on the Right Now Climate Fund to the tune of 100,000,000 dollars for natural climate solutions including forests, peatlands and wetlands. (I guess if you never pay taxes you have a lot of spare change to toss around.) The laudable part is that it will make Amazon carbon neutral 10 years ahead of the Paris accord schedule.

The Nature Conservancy and Amazon Partner to Bring Natural Climate Solutions to Scale

Today, The Nature Conservancy is announcing a $100 million commitment from Amazon to restore and protect forests, wetlands, grasslands, and peatlands around the world. Amazon is partnering with The Nature Conservancy – an organization with a proven track record of using the best-available science for conservation – to identify, design, and implement natural climate solutions initiatives.

The two organizations have entered into an exploratory phase to assess carbon reduction programs and to identify, design, and implement natural climate solutions, which will be supported by the Right Now Climate Fund. The fund is one part of the company’s efforts to achieve net-zero carbon emissions across its business by 2040 – 10 years ahead of the 2050 target outlined in the Paris climate agreement.

Are you thinking what I’m thinking? 100,000,000 is a lot of money. 2 million per state. It is enough money to put BDA’s in every 10 miles in all the headwater streams in the contiguous united states. If you invested all that money in beavers they would make sure your investment paid off.

We know that TNC has done great things for beavers, and terrible things for beavers in its history. The acting director now of The Nature Conservancy is Sally Jewell, the former Secretary of the Interior under Obama. She’s a Washington-State outdoor loving former oil engineer so we have to assume she knows a thing or two about beavers.

I hope she remembers this article written in their own magazine not too long ago.

Beaver Mimicry Projects Could Be Key to Restoring Wetlands

Left to their own devices, streams are messy. They wander and wind, pushing up against one bank before turning to swirl around another. In the spring, they pour over the top of the walls created to contain them, flooding wetlands and bringing water and life to everything from willows to deer.

Recent research is beginning to show that if humans create dams to mimic those built by beavers, the final result can lure beavers back and ultimately result in the same positive effects for fish, wildlife and vegetation.

Let me just repeat again. You can build an awful lot of BDA’s with 100,000,000 dollars. And after you do beavers will move in and do the rest for you, saving water, trapping carbon, enriching biodiversity, improving habitat for hative plants.. The Nature Company knows this and has told Jeff Bezos, right?

Just to make sure I sent them both a note yesterday. Maybe you should too.

“Now is the time to think big and work toward innovative solutions to climate change,” said Kara Hurst, worldwide director of sustainability, Amazon. “We need a partner like TNC to ensure we apply the best conservation science and develop strategic programs to reach our goals.”

We couldn’t agree more, Kara.

CLIMATE CHANGE MITIGATION IN PROGRESS

Good news from our friends at Wyoming Untrapped which had permission to run this ad on the last page of the Local Headwaters Magazine. The Headline reads “Climate Change Mitigation in Progress”.

I’m not able to embed the ad here but this is the excellent copy:

Beavers are born to build wetlands. Fight wildfire flooding and drought by ensuring water is available on our public landscapes. Prevent extinction of critical species by ensuring a complete ecosystem. Support a wide range of wildlife habitats including amphibians,fish and songbirds.

You may, and I think you do, recognize the photo as one taken in a certain Martinez California by our own Suzi Eszterhas. I believe that is Junior hauling off a willow branch generously provided by our own Jon Ridler. It’s pretty remarkable when you think about it all the places where the Martinez beavers have turned up. Including NOAA, USDA, and FWS. Considering all of these have photographers they pay for images, you would think people would notice the remarkable photos you are able to get when you allow beavers to live amoung you.

I’d like very much for it to catch on please.

IT’S THE ARIDITY, STUPID

heidi08 Beavers and climate change September 4, 2019

Time then for another rousing article that doesn’t mention beavers but SHOULD from Phys.org.

New feedback phenomenon found to drive increasing drought and aridity

A new Columbia Engineering study indicates that the world will experience more frequent and more extreme drought and aridity than currently experienced in the coming century, exacerbated by both climate change and land-atmosphere processes. The researchers demonstrate that concurrent soil drought and atmospheric aridity are largely driven by a series of land-atmosphere processes and feedback loops. They also found that land-atmosphere feedbacks would further intensify concurrent soil drought and atmospheric aridity in a warmer climate. The study was published today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

Are you following this? What they found is that DRY soil leads to the kind of conditions that cause MORE dry soil.

Soil drought, represented by very low soil moisture, and atmospheric aridity, represented by very high vapor pressure deficit, a combination of high temperature and low atmospheric humidity, are the two main stressors that drive widespread vegetation mortality and reduced terrestrial carbon uptake. Concurrent soil drought and atmospheric aridity is a time period when soil moisture is extremely low and vapor pressure deficit is extremely high.

Guess what makes the opposite of arid soil? Changing the quality of the soil where they live, around their home and under the home?

“Concurrent soil drought and atmospheric aridity have dramatic impacts on natural vegetation, agriculture, industry, and public health,” says Pierre Gentine, associate professor of earth and environmental engineering and affiliated with the Earth Institute. “Future intensification of concurrent soil drought and atmospheric aridity would be disastrous for ecosystems and greatly impact all aspects of our lives.”

It turns out that dry soil is more important to climate change than DROUGHT. More important than heatwaves. Letting the soil dry out starts all these other balls rolling towards disaster. Too bad there isn’t some free rodent that we could put to work all across America to keep the soil moist.

The PNAS study highlights the importance of soil moisture variability in enabling a series of processes and feedback loops affecting the Earth’s near-surface climate.

Add this to the list of things beavers could be doing for us everyday, everywhere if we would just be so kind as to stop killing them. Let’s not call it kindness. Hell. Let’s call it “Self-Interest”. I’m getting more and more convinced that this is our only truly renewable resource.

Yesterday it occurred to me that in all of the internet there should be a photo like this. There wasn’t. I thought that should change. Take my word for it and whatever you do don’t look for photos of beavers by candelight anywhere else.

BEAVER POPULARITY CONTESTS

heidi08 Beavers and climate change, Beavers and Fire Prevention, Beavers and Forests, Beavers and groundwater August 18, 2019

They say if you live long enough you’ll be impressed and surprised by everyone you thought was a disappointment. Or maybe they don’t say that, but they should because its TRUE. This has been a charmed week for beavers, and this article from Montana is good for the heart.

Middle-schoolers, Conservation Corps team up to hunt for nature’s engineers

To improve water in the Clark Fork River, it might be time to employ some talented engineers. Especially if they work for free.

Over the past five years, as dam removal and restoration work has improved more Western rivers, agencies and organizations have recognized the benefits that beavers could add to watersheds. So the Lolo National Forest wants to know where and how it might employ such an inexpensive helper, and the Clark Fork Coalition offered to help.

“I know, for the Lolo National Forest, climate and wildfire mitigation are things they’re really looking at. Beaver habitats store water and recharge groundwater so they can be effective at addressing climate change and wildfire,” said Clark Fork Coalition Education Manager Lily Haines.

In 2014, the Clark Fork Coalition conducted a watershed vulnerability assessment for the Lolo National Forest and found several streams with water quality problems, including high water temperatures, dwindling water quantity and sediment pollution.

Remember a few days ago when we read about them winning the grant from USFS for this work? Well this article brings it all to life, and it delights me very much. In this world there are two very unpopular groups that, lets be honest, everyone dreads dealing with: Beavers and Middleschoolers.

This combines the two annoyances beautifully.

I love this picture with a firey passion and they white hot heat of 1000 suns. It is just SO middleschool. No other group could work as hard and still seem so awkward and out of place. I love it!

Beaver dams cause streams to slow down and pool, which can clean the water by causing sediment to drop out. The ponds and surrounding wetlands can offset drought and reduce wildfire risk by keeping vegetation green. In addition, the ponds create good trout and wildlife habitat.

The problem is, due to trapping, damaged habitat or poor water quality, beavers are gone from many streams.

So each summer, six middle-school scientists spent a week wading along mountain streams and collecting data under the watchful eyes of two team leaders from the Montana Conservation Corps. A total of 30 students from around Montana learned to collect biological information over the course of five separate weeks this summer.

The kids measured stream width and gradient – beavers prefer more level slower-moving sections – stream pool depth, and the trees and vegetation along the stream. Starting at the mouth of the stream, they made measurements every 300 yards for as they could go, as long as stream conditions would still support beavers.

How much do we love this story? Pretty dam much, I can tell you.

Then, armed with good information and the best science, certain streams might eventually be managed for beavers, which will then manage the streams for everyone.

Occasionally, landowners concerned about flooding or loss of trees along streams don’t want beavers around. So Clark Fork Coalition employees are working on conflict resolution and tools that reduce flooding such as pond levelers. But on streams where those don’t work, managers could install beaver-dam analogues to create similar conditions to improve streams.

“One of the things they say is beavers is second only to man for their ability to manipulate the environment. Which means they and their habitat can do a lot of work to help us out,” Haines said “And we don’t have to pay them.”

Wonderful! That’s such a great use of two things that are so often woefully unappreciated: Youthful energy and beaver engineering. No wonder this program won the grant competition. I’m so happy everything worked out.

Getting young people to understand how they fit in the big picture is so important. Although sometimes its the young ones that teach you.

Now if you’re inspired to watch a young persons progress against incredible odds you definitely should check out Greta Thurnberg’s passage as she makes a sailing trip across the Atlantic. The whole journey is accessible and on Windy.com. where you can zoom in to see what they’re doing through tweets and instagram. We are having so much vicarious fun watching her success. The sailboat slipped into the right wind overnight and they toodled along at 24 knots. This morning she’s exercising with her team – dad and filmmaker – on the rails

BEAVERS: SINS OF THE PAST

heidi08 Beavers and climate change, Beavers and Nitrates, Beavers and water August 10, 2019

Dr. Ellen Wohl.the accomplished fluvial geomorphologist and hydrologist didn’t go to graduate school to study beavers. She hasn’t spent her career sresearching them at Colorado State. Ellen studies rivers and knows more about them, their fluvial processes and history than maybe any human living.

But her research keeps bumping into one particular non-human over and over again,

The American Geophysical Union was formed in 1919 and is housed in Washington DC, (or was when I started this post- it may have been moved with the USDA by now to Kansas.) Their Centennial celebration invited scientists across the nation to show case important works in a field that is literally defining its own boundaries.

And one of those chosen scientists is Dr. Ellen Wohl, who wrote about our own forgotten impact on rivers and brought an old friend along to help her tell the story.

Forgotten Legacies: Understanding Human Influences on Rivers

Logging, urbanization, and dam building are a few ways people have significantly altered natural river ecosystems. Understanding that influence is a grand challenge of our time.

Rivers are fundamental landscape components that provide vital ecosystem services, including drinking water supplies, habitat, biodiversity, and attenuation of downstream fluxes of water, sediment, organic carbon, and nutrients. Extensive research has been devoted to quantifying and predicting river characteristics such as stream flow, sediment transport, and channel morphology and stability. However, scientists and society more broadly are often unaware of the long-standing effects of human activities on contemporary river ecosystems, particularly when those activities ceased long ago, and thus, the legacies of humans on rivers have been inadequately acknowledged and addressed

Her basic tenet? We have screwed up our rivers for so long that we don’t even remember what they’re supposed to look like. We need to look at historical clues to understand what we should be striving for in restoration. And you know what that means.

Legacies, in this context, are defined as persistent changes in natural systems resulting from human activities. Legacies that affect river ecosystems result from human alterations both outside river corridors, such as timber harvesting and urbanization, and within river corridors, including flow regulation, river engineering, and removal of large-wood debris and beaver dams.

The desecration we created was the result of no invasion. The damage was done by our own hands, for our own gain for hundreds of years. Centuries of trapping lead to centuries of broken river mechanisms, and if we’re going to fix that we need to strive to replace some semblance of what was stolen.

There are various approaches to accomplish this. One is to maintain or restore characteristics of a river corridor that create a desired process. This approach underlies, for example, the restoration of riparian vegetation as a buffer to retain upland inputs of nitrogen, phosphorus, and fine sediment. Another approach is to create a template of river corridor form that will facilitate desired processes. Examples include the emplacement of engineered logjams [Roni et al., 2014] or beaver dams [Bouwes et al., 2016] to mimic the function of natural features, setting back levees to restore channel-floodplain connectivity [Florsheim and Mount, 2002], and removing artificial barriers to allow high flows to return to abandoned channels [Nilsson et al., 2005b].

To fix our rivers bring back beavers. Don’t look at me, I didn’t say it. This is in a national publication striving for the health of our planet. I trust Dr. Woh’s judgment implicitly in these matters, don’t you?

Effectively addressing these questions requires that we understand how past human activities have modified river corridor process and form, as well as how those past alterations constrain river science and management going forward.

You have to know what was lost before you try and get it back. That seems obvious. And that means we have to recognize how much we devastated those streams by taking out beavers of them. Which means we have to admit that beavers are good for streams. It’s basic science. No one can argue with that?

Oh, wait. Never mind.

Speaking of government scientists I have a funny funny joke I’ve been saving to tell you.

Seems that all the new restrictions on beaver trapping for the USDA in Oregon and California have made wildlife services want to add some new tools to the rusty box. They are reportedly working on a brochure to give to landowners when they complain about beavers that talks about coexistence and all the good things they do. So of course they’re looking for photos and approached Michael Pollock to see if he had some.

So of course he asked me. If Worth A Dam might have a few good beaver photos worth sharing with wildlife services to teach folks to live with beavers.

Now that’s one place I never expected to be. So of course I gathered a collection of wonderful beaver photos and passed them along with the understanding that they’d credit Cheryl Reynolds of Worth A Dam if they used them. Stay tuned for more of the story because we might be in a wildlife services pamphlet.

Think about that.