Category: Beavers and Forests

GOODNESS GRACIOUS, GREAT BEAVERS OF FIRE!

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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DR. FAIRFAX AND SMOKEY THE BEAVER

heidi08 Beavers and Fire Prevention January 31, 2020

I was allowed to see something wonderful yesterday. Dr. Emily Fairfax recently did a killer presentation for the forest service about beavers and fire.

For her research she compared large fires across 5 states (including California) and found that in areas that there were beaver dams the vegetation was lusher before, during and after the fires. Part of the reason was the many complex dams they maintained making ponds and part of it was the canals they dug spreading water around the landscape. She argues persuasively and with all the right statistics that we need to let beavers do their thing more often.

Oh and she mentioned me, which was kind of surprising.

I spent all day trying to get the presentation shareable so you and everyone else could know what an AWESOME job Emily did, but it failed for some reason. I will try again but just know that her presentation is AMAZING and should be on the governors iphone in the morning.

Now it appears to be working again, but if for some reason it stops just know I will work to bring it back. It begins with the facilitators voice and then cuts to Emily. I would listen all the way through if you have time.

It’s that good.

BROTHER, CAN YOU SPARE A BEAVER?

heidi08 Beavers and climate change, Beavers and Fire Prevention January 3, 2020

Good morning. It’s he last official day of vacation, we’re getting ready for the annual ravioli feast and making cookies today, which is always pleasant in a slightly terrifying way. The fires in Australia are notching up the panic about climate change and lots of folks are pinning their hopes on beavers. Which is okay by me. Better late than never, I always say. Here are some thoughts from Steve Jones of the UK who maintains the Natural Areas Blog.

Re-wetting the countryside

As I write this, parts of Australia are gripped by what seems like a perpetual drought and, with its forests and shrublands tinder-dry, forest fires are raging across some coastal areas.

Climate scientists project increasing summer heat in the UK, as the Mediterranean climate space shifts progressively north. We can expect our average summers to be warmer, and more frequent, on average hotter, summer droughts.

So, to help to mitigate the fire risks posed by the warming we’re already locked into, we need to re-wet floodplain corridors and re-moisten whole farmed landscapes. Here’s how:

A how-to ;list on avoiding wildfires. Now this is useful. Are you paying attention?

River-floodplain corridors should be formally designated as Critical Natural Infrastructure, and managed as integrated wholes. Management should be restricted to enabling natural system recovery, in an expansion of natural coastal management into fluvial systems.

Beavers should be reintroduced at key sites to provide strategic source populations for progressive re-colonisation of all river systems across the UK.

Did you catch that? Beavers are the answer to a drying planet. Also a flooding plane. Also a burning planet. Also a species deprived planet, There are few more suggestions on the list regarding not building in flood plains, but that seems like a DAM good start to me.

In the absence of beavers or pending their return, all surface field edge drains and streams should have leaky dams and small wetland features installed, across entire catchments.

BDA’s for everyone waiting in long lines for beavers. It should stretch for miles. There should barely be enough beavers to go around. You know is coming. In a few short years everyone will want theirs.

FIGHTING FIRE WITH EMILY AND BEAVERS

heidi08 Beavers and Fire Prevention, Beavers and Forests December 14, 2019

When you finish your dissertation and present the results at a conference of your peers it can be thrilling, affirming, daunting, terrifying. It can make all those late nights worth it, all the statistics and the slogging. You might get praised by someone you really respect, or get to shake the hand of a hero you referenced a million times in your lit review. You might get some crabby question from the competition who doesn’t agree with your findings. You might spill cheap coffee on your new suit and have to change in the car. You might get a million different outcomes.

You almost never get this.

Are Beavers Nature’s “Little Firefighters”?

It’s about dam time: Beavers are acknowledged for their firefighting skills in five recent blazes.

When a wildfire tears through a landscape, there can be little left behind.

A new study, though, suggests that beavers may be protecting life around streams, thanks to their signature dams. Satellite images from five major wildfires in the United States revealed that corridors around beaver habitat stayed green even after a wildfire.

Millions of beavers live in forests across North America, and they make their homes in a particular way: By stacking piles of branches and rocks in a river’s path, they slow its flow and create a pool of calm water to call home. They even dig little channels radiating out from their pools to create “little water highways,” said Emily Fairfax, an assistant professor at California State University Channel Islands who led the study.

Emily presented her research THREE DAYS AGO at the conference in San Francisco. Three DAYS!!! That’s how long it takes for star research to find its way into a front page article. Please tell me that someone is putting this on the governors desk with his coffee and making sure he pays attention.

Fairfax wondered whether beaver dams would insulate riparian vegetation, as well as the fish and amphibians that live there, from wildfire damage. Wildfires course through landscapes naturally, but blazes will become more frequent as climate change dries out forests.

Fairfax sifted through records of past fires in the U.S. Geological Survey’s database and chose five recent fires that occurred in beaver habitat. She then analyzed the “greenness” of vegetation before, during, and after the fires. She used measurements from NASA’s Landsat satellites, which use red and near-infrared light to detect the lushness of vegetation.

Fairfax found that vegetation along sections of a river without dams burned straight to the river’s edge. But for sections with a resident beaver, “essentially, the plants don’t know a fire is happening.” The channels dug by beavers acted like irrigation channels, said Fairfax, keeping vegetation too wet to burn, even during drought. In all, stretches of river without beavers lost 51% of their vegetation greenness, compared with a 19% reduction for sections with beavers.

EMILY you rising star of beavers! We knew you’d be making a difference. With your embrace of technology and your love of nature it was destiny. We never even doubted it for a moment.

But we never even hoped how quickly it would all happen.

FIRES AND FLOODS AND BEAVERS, OH MY!

heidi08 Beavers, Beavers and Fire Prevention, Beavers and Flooding November 21, 2019

Fires and floods are the punishing destructive forces of nature that even the bible recognizes. The answer to both might be staring us in the face. What if what we needed all along wasn’t an ark, but a some beavers?

The National Trust is preparing to release a small number of beavers into the south of England to help manage the landscape and combat flooding.

In a scheme to combat flooding, the National Trust is planning to release a small number of beavers in England. Initially, two pairs of beavers will be released into large woodland enclosures in Holnicote, Somerset, near tributaries to the River Aller. A third pair of beavers will be released into an enclosure at Valewood, on the edge of the South Downs, West Sussex.

Beavers, once native to Britain, were hunted to extinction in the 1500s, although small numbers have been observed in the wild in Scotland and Devon in recent years. Beavers are considered a ‘keystone’ species due to their work building dams in rivers, which significantly affects the landscape and ecosystem around them. Through dam building, beavers help restore precious wetlands through erosion reduction, downstream flood control and water cleansing. However, scientists have also raised concerns about the volumes of carbon being released into the atmosphere from soil as a result of beaver damming.

That’s right. Beavers to the rescue. Again. Although no solution is without its risks. Noah might deserve full disclosure.

“Beavers are nature’s engineers and can create remarkable wetland habitats that benefit a host of species, including water voles, wildfowl, craneflies, water beetles and dragonflies,” said David Elliot, National Trust lead ranger for Valewood. “These in turn help support breeding fish and insect-eating birds such as spotted flycatchers.”

Well said.

Yes they do. And if prevent flooding’s not enough, maybe you’ll be interested to know they can also reduce the risk of fire.

Don’t believe me? Ask a scientist.

Smokey the Beaver: Can Beaver Dams Help Protect Riparian Vegetation During Wildfire?

When beavers move onto a creek, they build dams that slow the flow of water and spread it out over the landscape. That stored water can help keep the entire landscape wet and lush, even when everywhere else is dry. People have seen beaver-dammed areas stay green through droughts before, and this past year photographs of green beaver wetlands surrounded by the char of wildfire showed up in the news media. Although we are seeing this happen, there weren’t any studies proving that places with beaver damming are burned less by wildfires than places without beaver damming. We looked at five different large wildfires that burned in places with beavers, and use satellite data of plant greenness to see whether or not the plants actually stayed green and healthy during the fires if they were near beaver dams. Our data confirms what people had already seen happening: places with beaver stay green even during wildfires, places without beavers do not. For a short (45-second) animation of this phenomenon,

Wow! December 11 in San Francisco. That would be our own heroine Emily Fairfax who wowed the world with her smart research and stop motion film last year. Emily started work as an assistant professor at Cal State Channel Islands and if she keeps this up I’m expecting great things for her and beavers.

Some say the world will end in fire,

Some say in ice.

From what I’ve tasted of desire

I hold with those who favor fire.

But if it had to perish twice,

I think I know enough of hate

To say that for destruction ice

Is also great

And would suffice.

Robert Frost