Category: Beavers and groundwater

SAVING BEAVERS TO SAVE WATER

heidi08 Beavers and groundwater, Beavers and water April 12, 2020

Goodness I must have sounded very plaintive yesterday because my post received a lot of sympathetic ‘buck up’ responses. Sheesh, don’t feel sorry for me. I do okay. I’m in a book for pete’s sake! How many people are in a book, I ask you?

…Heidi Perryman, a former child psychologist who, through willpower and single-mindedness, has become one of the planet’s foremost authorities on Castor canadensis….Ask a fellow Beaver Believer to characterize Heidi Perryman, and the primary descriptor you’ll hear is “force of nature.” Perryman’s primary endeavor is Worth A Dam, an online nonprofit that serves as a comprehensive clearinghouse for beaver science and coexistence techniques; a beaver news outlet, updated daily; and a sort of gossip blog for the castor cognoscenti.

Ben Goldfarb “Eager”

And the book won the Penn science writing award so we know it MUST be true! No more sitting around pining over some piddly donation. Do not despair. The sun also rises. And yesterday I finished something I’m very proud of an can’t wait to share with you.

In order to fully docuent my efforts allow me to explain that it meant stripping out the audio from another film from the Pacific States Marine Fisheries Commission that I loved but thought wasn’t punchy enough, and using audacity to re-sequence the clip to my liking with background noises to emphasize the point. Then downloading it as a wav. file and it then uploading it to audioacrobat to turn it into an MP3 file. Then getting it to Powtoon with images so it could be worked into an instructive video.

Probably 5 days of work but my goodness I’m pleased with the finished product. Please share with all your friends before the copy right police come to take me away.

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Oh and happy Easter!

ONE RIVER, UNDERGROUND, IRREPLACEABLE, WITH HABITAT AND WETLANDS FOR ALL.

Folks are starting to wake up to the unexpected effects of climate change. Like a the effect a 1.5 celsius rise could have on evapotranspiration all across the United States. Not just in the west where we’re used to it.

As groundwater depletes, arid American West is moving east

“We asked what would the response look like if we included the entire complexity of subsurface water movement in a large-scale simulation, and we think this is the first time this has been done,” said Condon, lead author of the paper and assistant professor of hydrology and atmospheric sciences at the University of Arizona.

The results, published today in Nature Communications, show that as warming temperatures shift the balance between water supply and demand, shallow groundwater storage can buffer plant water stress—but only where shallow groundwater connections are present, and not indefinitely. As warming persists, that storage can be depleted—at the expense of vital connections between surface water, such as rivers, streams and water reservoirs underground.

Excessive pumping from groundwater that feeds rivers, like the Ganges River (shown), is harming river ecosystems around the world.

The calculations revealed a direct response of shallow groundwater storage to warming that demonstrates the strong and early effect that even low to moderate warming may have on groundwater storage and evapotranspiration.

“Even with a 1.5 degrees Celsius warming case, we’re likely to lose a lot of groundwater,” said Reed Maxwell, professor of hydrology at the Colorado School of Mines, who co-authored the paper with Laura Condon of the University of Arizona and Adam Atchley of Los Alamos National Laboratory. “The East Coast could start looking like the West Coast from a water standpoint. That’s going to be a real challenge.”

Gosh if ONLY there were some kind of animal that was driven day and night to make and maintain little dams that would recharge the water table everywhere across the United States. But what are the odds of that happening? I ask you.

Well just because you have a graphic for it doesn’t mean its true. I’m sure there’s a whole division of the EPA devoted to making graphics to promote fake ideas. Like Climate change.

In the western U.S., changes in groundwater storage may remain masked for a long time, the study revealed, because the groundwater there is already deep, and dropping levels would not have as great an effect on surface waters. Additionally, the region’s vegetation is already largely water limited and adapted to being disconnected from deep groundwater sources.

However, the eastern U.S. will be much more sensitive to a lowering of the water table. Groundwater and surface water are more closely linked, and depleting the groundwater will be more disruptive to vegetation, streams and rivers. Many of the systems that have been put in place in the western U.S. for handling and managing water shortage are lacking in the eastern part of the country, as well.

The study revealed that regions in the eastern U.S. may reach a tipping point sooner rather than later, when vegetation starts to lose access to shallow groundwater as storage is depleted with warming.

“We are facing a crisis in global groundwater storage,” Condon said. “Huge groundwater reservoirs are drying up at an alarming rate, and that’s a problem because they nourish major growing regions around the world.”

You can’t just wake up every day and keep saying over and over the problems we are facing could be helped by letting more beavers do the jobs they want to do. It just can’t be that simple. You sound like a crackpot. No one is going to believe you.

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

SOLUTIONS UNDER OUR FEET

heidi08 Beavers and groundwater June 21, 2019

It happens pretty often, Some article in phys,org exactly profiles a problem beavers could help with if we just stopped killing them but the article itself never once mentions this actual solution. We call these the beaver-articles-without-beavers and this example sent by Bob Kobres of Georgia is an excellent demonstration.

Groundwater pumping has significantly reduced US stream flows

Groundwater pumping in the last century has contributed as much as 50 percent to stream flow declines in some U.S. rivers, according to new research led by a University of Arizona hydrologist.

The new study has important implications for managing U.S. water resources. Laws regulating the use of groundwater and surface waters differ from state to state. Some Western states, Arizona among them, manage groundwater and surface water separately.

The scientists focused particularly on the Colorado and Mississippi River basins and looked exclusively at the effects of past groundwater pumping because those losses have already occurred.

The U.S. Geological Survey has calculated the loss of groundwater over the 20th century as 800 cubic kilometers, or 649 million acre-feet. That amount of water would cover the states of Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, Nevada, Utah, Colorado, Arizona and New Mexico, plus most of California, with water one foot deep.

Imagine everyone in your state is sharing an ice cream soda by sipping from a straw at the counter. Only this ice cream soda feeds humans and crops and tap water for the entire state Would it matter if more people came to share the soda or if some folks were sipping twice as hard? You bet it would.

If only there were some kind of natural way to replenish and recharge groundwater. Dam.

“We showed that because we’ve taken all of this water out of the subsurface, that has had really big impacts on how our land surface hydrology behaves,” she said. “We can show in our simulation that by taking out this groundwater, we have dried up lots of small streams across the U.S. because those streams would have been fed by groundwater discharge.”

Groundwater helps provide water to existing vegetation, including crops, Condon said.

Receding water tables and dwindling streams can make irrigating crops more difficult and costly. Some native vegetation including cottonwood trees will eventually die if the water table drops below their roots.

Groundwater is often the slowest component of the terrestrial hydrologic system to recover from losses, Condon said.

Gosh, groundwater sure sounds important. I bet if there were some kind of simple solution folks would JUMP at the chance to recharge it. RIght?

The regions most sensitive to a lowering of the water table are east of the Rocky Mountains, where initially the water table was shallow, at the depth of 6-33 feet (2-10 meters), she said. In those regions, groundwater and surface water are more closely linked, and depleting the groundwater is more disruptive to vegetation, streams and rivers.

Other research has shown that parts of the Midwest where the amount of precipitation used to equal the evaporative demand—meaning plants didn’t need irrigation—are becoming more arid, she said. Those are some of the regions where groundwater pumping has reduced surface waters.

You mean all those arid, farming states that are so intolerant of beavers? Like Oklahoma and Kansas? They’re the most vulnerable to drought because they have the weakest groundwater? And they kill beavers the fastest?

It’s darn ironic isn’t it that the places that need water-savers the most tolerate them the least.