Category: Beavers and Fire Prevention

JUST BETWEEN US AND THE GOLDEN STATE

When Emily Fairfax became assistant professor at Cal State Channel Islands, I knew the beaver world was in for a treat. But I couldn’t have possibly guessed how much of one. Emily and beavers are the subject of a glossy new pair of articles in Ojai & Ventura Co Edible, and she just published her fire research in the journal of Ecological Applications. I can’t decide which one to write about first, but I’ll just give a preview.

Smokey the Beaver: beaver‐dammed riparian corridors stay green during wildfire throughout the western USA

The articleS in Edible are a two fold, one is a slam dunk look at whether beavers belong in Ventura county (they do) with a fantastic discussion with Rick Lanman and look at our research lovingly written by Leslie Baehr. The other is a walk and talk with Emily about the good things beaver dams bring. Well save the first one for another day.

Tour a Stream with a Beaver Expert

Emily Fairfax, PhD., is an ecohydrologist and assistant professor of environmental science and resource management at CSU Channel Islands. Emily researches how beavers, which are native to California, change waterways and riparian ecosystems. In particular, she studies how beaver damming makes drought and fire resistant patches in the landscape. Her students and colleagues can affirm that when Emily says she can talk about beavers for hours, she’s not kidding.

Click twice on the image to see it larger.

STREAMS WITHOUT BEAVER are mostly characterized by what you don’t see. They tend to be a single straight and deep channel that doesn’t meander much through the landscape. As a result, the water does not spread throughout the landscape and the vegetation tends to be a lot smaller, scrubbier, and drier. There is also a lack of wildlife.

Oh my goodness Emily, who do I thank at the Channel Islands for hiring you? You could have ended up in Wisconsin or Colorado and we are soooo grateful for you being in California!

Contrary to popular depiction, a healthy riparian ecosystem often looks less like a stream and more like a wetland. One of the first things you will notice about STREAMS WITH BEAVER is how green they are. Vegetation tends to be healthier, bigger, and more abundant. Vegetation also stays greener further into the dry season. In fact, vegetation in some of the local beaver areas I study has become even greener into the dry season.

The heavy ponds also push water into the ground, recharging our aquifers. This groundwater is then released to the surface when pond-levels are low, buffering drought and creating year-round stream flow.

Locally, in the Los Padres where I study, we see dams between one and three feet tall and maybe 20 to 50 yards long, which is not that big for a beaver dam.

Lucky, lucky beavers in Los Padres. And lucky, lucky people that get a chance to learn from her.

Beaver habitat is characterized by abundant wildlife. Birds, insects, and frogs all thrive here and larger mammals may use the ponds as a watering hole.

Many researchers are particularly interested in the habitat’s effect on fish like salmon and our endangered steelhead who are born in streams, live their lives in the sea, and migrate back to the stream to reproduce. The beaver ponds provide slow-water rest areas for fish swimming upstream, abundant food for the young swimming downstream, and deep water protection from predators for both. This results in increased fish numbers and size.

Oh my goodness. I’m officially hiring you as the new beaver publicist of the golden state. It’s so nice to think someone will take over for me when I retire.

It’s not just wildlife that benefit. Beaver make for great ranching buddies since they create watering holes for cattle and healthier grazing pasture. An ecosystem that captures water can act as a natural fire break with fires fizzling out when they encounter the wetlands.

You might also find humans in this verdant ecosystem. In many areas, such as wine country, beavers attract tourism.

Okay I’m sold. Where do I sign up? Check out Emily’s new article complete with some very good reasons for California to befriend beaver.

Abstract

Beaver dams are gaining popularity as a low‐tech, low‐cost strategy to build climate resiliency at the landscape scale. They slow and store water that can be accessed by riparian vegetation during dry periods, effectively protecting riparian ecosystems from droughts. Whether or not this protection extends to wildfire has been discussed anecdotally but has not been examined in a scientific context. We used remotely sensed Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) data to compare riparian vegetation greenness in areas with and without beaver damming during wildfire. We include data from five large wildfires of varying burn severity and dominant landcover settings in the western USA in our analysis. We found that beaver‐dammed riparian corridors are relatively unaffected by wildfire when compared to similar riparian corridors without beaver damming. On average, the decrease in NDVI during fire in areas without beaver is 3.05 times as large as it is in areas with beaver. However, plant greenness rebounded in the year after wildfire regardless of beaver activity. Thus, we conclude that while beaver activity does not necessarily play a role in riparian vegetation post‐fire resilience, it does play a significant role in riparian vegetation fire resistance and refugia creation.

I’ll post the full article or your perusal but here’s the whopping conclusion and my favorite part:

As it stands today, wetland habitat is very limited and beavers can create and
maintain wetland habitat that persists through flood, drought, and as we have shown in this study – fire. This has immediate relevance to scientists and practitioners across the North America and Eurasia – particularly in places with increasing wildfire risk and existing or planned beaver populations. Perhaps instead of relying solely on human engineering and management to create and maintain fire-resistant landscape patches, we could benefit from beaver’s ecosystem engineering to achieve the same goals at a lower cost.

And scene! Emily is our hero. I believe she can do anything. Here’s the famed researcher gamely trying out Bob Rust’s junior beavercycle at a certain beaver festival.

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Go read the whole thing. And share if you share any friends with the Governor.

FairfaxWhittle_2020_SmokeyTheBeaver

BEAVER HABITAT CREATES FUEL BREAKS

The first time the “Bioneers” conference appeared on this website was 2010. In 2009 Brock Dolman had presented and mentioned the importance of beavers. It was surprising news at the time. But it is mainstream today. Because that’s the way change happens, slowly at first, and then all at once.

Fire and Water: Land and Watershed Management in the Age of Climate Change

California is a biodiversity hotspot, but its complex ecosystems are some of the first to model the consequences of a warming atmosphere. Wildfires are currently raging throughout California, burning through hundreds of thousands of acres and spreading rapidly. Climate change is fueling these wildfires — a problem that will only continue to escalate as the environment becomes drier and hotter.

Fire ecology experts are leading the search for solutions, as they seek to restore the healthy and natural role of fire in ecosystems, while combating the poor land and watershed management practices that have led us to this crisis. In this panel discussion from the 2016 Bioneers Conference, four leading fire ecologists discuss one burning question: How can modern society renew our relationship with the land to stop the wildfire crisis?

Ooh ooh I know, call on me! Or, hey maybe Brock can take this one.

And then there is one very special critter in the riparian part of our watersheds, and that’s our beaver. Right now many of our watersheds have been damaged in all sorts of ways, including by being overharvested and eroded by roads and off-road vehicles. We’ve reduced the complexity of those systems and their capacity to support diverse life, especially aquatic life, but really all life that depends on water. But beavers are forest farmers. They slow, spread and sink water, and they increase the wetted width of their habitats to grow the food that they eat because they’re herbivores. They eat bark and cambium and cattail roots and grasses. They need to slow water down to grow riparian forests and wetlands, which happen to be then sequestering carbon and creating other habitat. They are great hydrological engineers, and we should hire as many of them as possible.

Right now in California we have a decreasing snow pack in many of our high elevation systems, but runoff volumes are increasing in mountain meadows and systems lower down. Our natural water storage capacity and distribution system is out of balance. If we can we work with beavers as a keystone species, they can interface with these processes and play an important role in re-establishing a healthy hydrologic cycle. And there’s some good science on beaver habitat mitigating the intensity of fire by creating fuel breaks in the bottom ends of these systems. Beavers rehydrate the valley bottoms and increase the wetted width of these linear corridors that then act as natural firebreak systems. So bring back the beaver in California!

Excellent work! Especially the last part about beavers mitigating fire by providing fuel breaks. That’s pretty much what we need in the west. Damper soil that’s less flammable. Go Beavers. I’ve been thinking that our ecosystem poster might work in an hourglass shape, with the creatures underwater at the bottom and the ones above at the top. Of course the beaver dam would be the middle, giving both sides what they need. I played around with the notion yesterday. What do you think?

“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.

BEAVER CHAMPIONS ON THE PACIFIC COAST

heidi08 Beavers and Fire Prevention, Beavers and salmon, Flow Device Installed April 29, 2020

I’m not sure this has ever happened before. There are THREE very important beaver stories this morning meaning very good things about beavers and I cannot pick between the three. I’m going to have to profile each thing and you have to promise to come back and read the whole thing. I’m sorry to assign homework, but it’s necessary. They’re that good.

The first and most startling news is a profile piece about Emily Fairfax in the UC agriculture and natural resources blog.

From being an engineer to researching nature’s engineers

“When I came face to face with beaver dams for the first time, I had what can only be described as a transformative experience,” says Emily Fairfax, an assistant professor of environmental science and resource management at California State University, Channel Islands. While leading a canoe trip through the Boundary Waters of northern Minnesota, she encountered what she describes as “just these enormous, impressive features” – created by beavers. “You truly realize how sturdy beaver dams are while dragging your canoe over them,” she adds, laughing. “They are incredible from an engineering perspective.”

Despite being taken by the handiwork of beavers in that initial encounter, Fairfax says “I just put that experience in my back pocket for a long time.” After majoring in chemistry and physics in college, she went on to work as an engineer. “But, I kept going fishing, visiting wetlands and creeks, and realized I wanted to be out in these places in my day to day life.”

“Then, I watched the documentary Leave it to Beavers. It was about how beavers fundamentally alter landscapes. I was reminded of the beavers I’d seen in Minnesota and was like, I want to study this. On a bit of a whim, I applied to graduate school, and haven’t looked back. Now it’s all beavers, all day, and they make me so happy. It turns out rather than being an engineer, I was called to study nature’s engineers.”

I had NO idea that Emily was inspired by Jari’s documentary! WOW! The world might have been stuck with another engineer if it weren’t for that! I’m so touched and my mind is a little bit blown. I had just assumed she got involved because her thesis chair was interested or something. The article goes on to talk about her viral video and ends in her interest in California.

Working in California, Fairfax’s biggest task now is locating beavers. She notes that before beaver trapping there were likely upwards of 400 million beavers in North America, meaning they were everywhere. “Trapping took them down to 100,000, and now estimates put them back up to 10 or 20 million. They are prevalent in certain areas like the Colorado Rockies and the Sierra Nevada, but we still don’t see them often in many downstream areas that provide great habitat.”

For now, she says, “I’ve got students hiking streams just looking for signs of them, and when I give public talks, people will sometimes tell me about how they used to see them on a creek in the 70’s. That might not seem relevant, but that kind of information is so valuable. So now I’m basically saying to people, if you see a beaver dam anywhere in California, please tell me about it!”

I’ll make sure we all tell you when we see them! Ohh you are the hope of a new beaver generation Dr. Emily Fairfax. Make sure you read the Work to protect Sonoma beaver lodge begins

To prevent flooding and manage water levels in a Sonoma creek, a pond leveler will be installed where a family of beavers is living, Sonoma County Water Agency officials said.

The pond leveler will help water transfer through the beaver dam so that the pond doesn’t cause flooding. It will also assist with maintaining the habitat for the beavers, said David Cook, senior environmental specialist at Sonoma County Water Agency.

There was even an insert about my timing concerns, because the reporter was included in the email thread where I learned of it.

Heidi Perryman, of urban-beaver protection group Martinez Beavers, asked the agency to wait until kit — or, baby beaver — season is over, which is mid-to-late May. But Brock Dolman, program director of Occidental Arts and Ecology Center, which is partnering with the water agency and Swift Water Designs in the project, said they also would prefer to do the work outside of kit season and were prepared to do the install in March, but then COVID-19 got in the way.

Isn’t that just like Heidi, always poking her nose in and mucking around. Well I also heard from a neighbor that the beavers were busy that night trying to plug the outflow of the pipe so you may not have heard the last of this story. It’s good that a flow device was used. Hopefully the beavers can make it work. Fingers crossed.

The last piece of really OUTSTANDING news comes from Port Moody, B.C. See a lot of the challenges to the beavers have come from the fish hatchery folk which are saying that beaver dams stop chum. Jim and Judy have been doing their home work AND the city’s homework and heard from famous Fisheries Biologist Dr. Marvin Rosenau. that their stream supported coho salmon. The real kind not the hatchery frankensteins. And there’s all this data saying beavers are good for coho and no data at all saying they’re good for chum. Which stinks.

But they got a go pro camera and have been using it to shoot underwater and GUESS WHAT THEY FILMED and Dr. Marvin Rosenau. identified right away in the beaver pond???

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It’s hard to see but unmistakable. Around the 55 second mark you can see it best on the upper left hand corner. Look for the while glint of its eye and then the wiggle of its tail as it moves forward. That would be coho fry. As in the real deal. As in proof of a beaver pond doing what it should. As in pass the coho birthday cake and lets have a party!

GOODNESS GRACIOUS, GREAT BEAVERS OF FIRE!

heidi08 Beavers and Fire Prevention, Beavers and water April 17, 2020

How beaver-connected am I? I’ll tell you how connected. I was sitting home minding my business yesterday when I got an excited email from the former governor’s former water advisor that there was an article about beavers in this month’s Estuary Newsletter, and THEN the author of the article, Lisa Owens Viani wrote me that her article had been published!

Because it’s not what you know about beavers, its who you know. Am I right?

Beaver dams may offer wildfire protection to western watersheds

in addition to providing better-known benefits such as groundwater recharge, wetland and habitat creation, and riparian restoration. A new study by California State University Channel Islands professor Emily Fairfax analyzed satellite-derived vegetation indices of riparian areas and beaver dams mapped via Google Earth. At the same time, Fairfax analyzed data for large (over 30,000 acre) wildfires that had occurred between 2000 and 2018 in California, Wyoming, Colorado, Idaho, and Oregon, and compared the fate of beaver-dammed areas to areas without dams. Fairfax found that riparian corridors within 100 meters of beaver ponds were buffered from wildfires.

“In all of them, the beaver ponds made it through the fire and stayed much greener. The beaver-dammed riparian zones were functioning differently,” says Fairfax. While the riparian areas without beaver dams eventually recovered on their own, she says, vegetation in the areas with dams stayed green and did not go through the amount of habitat destruction the other areas did. Fairfax was surprised by the amount of beaver damming and wet meadow development she found in her study. “Those colonies have probably been there for hundreds of years, making it through wildfires. There’s not a chance they haven’t burned in the last 200 years.” With drought and wildfire increasing in the West, she says, this latest finding is yet another reason to welcome beavers back to Bay Area waterways.

As if we NEEDED another reason to welcome them back! Wonderful! Emily’s excellent research is leaping to the head of the pack, and not a moment too soon because at this rate by the time we’re done sheltering in place it will be another fire season. Thanks Emily and Lisa for helping beavers spread the word.

We shouldn’t be at all surprised. Only a somber and dignified researcher could produce a doctoral dissertation of this caliber.

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