Category: Beavers and Nitrates

ANOTHER HARD PROBLEM BEAVERS COULD BE SOLVING

heidi08 Beavers and Nitrates April 2, 2020

Time for another friendly beaver report from the science folks who don’t know they’re writing about beavers. Thank you to Bob Kobres from Georgia who send this my way. We wish you and Jane peaceful seclusion in this hour of plague.

There’s too much nitrogen and phosphorus in U.S. waterways

Even minor amounts of human activity can increase nutrient concentrations in fresh waters that can damage the environment, according to a new study.

These findings suggest most U.S. streams and rivers have higher levels of nitrogen and phosphorus than is recommended. Although nutrients are a natural part of aquatic ecosystems like streams and rivers, too much of either nutrient can have lasting impacts on the environment and public health.

“Ecosystems are being loaded with legacy and current nitrogen and phosphorus, and their capacity to hold these nutrients in many cases is decreasing,” said FIU associate professor John Kominoski, an ecologist and co-author of the study. “Not only are they being overwhelmed by nutrients, but they also have and continue to undergo hydrological and land use alterations.”

Gosh all that car washing soap and fertilizer is ruining our creeks and streams It sure would be great if there were some way to fix that which didn’t cost too much money, so every city across America could afford it. Something natural that improved things for fish and wildlife too. But I guess that crazy pipe dream could never happen.

The research, led by hydrologist Professor Richard Brazier, found that the work of a single family of beavers had removed high levels of sediment, nitrogen and phosphorus from the water that flowed through their 2.5 hectare enclosure.May 9, 2018

“High concentrations of nitrogen and phosphorus in our waterways are concerning because they threaten both human and ecosystem health,” said David Manning, an assistant professor of biology at the University of Nebraska at Omaha and lead author on the paper. “Nutrients are essential for all life, but when they get too high in our waterways, they can fundamentally change the way a stream looks and operates.”

In addition to causing algal blooms, these elevated nutrient concentrations can lead to a lack of species diversity and oxygen depletion. High nutrient concentrations can also affect the purity of the water we drink.

Gosh that sounds terrible. I sure hope they stumble on a solution sometime soon.

NOBODY DOES IT BETTER THAN BEAVERS

heidi08 Beavers and Nitrates, Beavers and salmon, Beavers and trout February 17, 2020

England just isn’;t sure beavers fit onto their landscape anymore, but all indications point in their favor. I don’t know what they’re expecting. A golden sword rising from the misty lake to show they belong? Maybe.

Wild beavers reduce flood risk and boost wildlife, study finds

Beavers living wild on an English river have reduced the risk of flooding for local people and boosted wildlife, a five-year trial has found.

The aquatic mammals living on the River Otter in Devon have caused some localised problems for several landowners, but these could be addressed successfully with “active management”, the study said.

Other wildlife, including fish, water voles, amphibians and birds, have benefited from the presence of the beavers living on the river and creating new habitat.

The findings are the culmination of a five-year study of the first licensed release of beavers into the wild in England since they were hunted to extinction more than 400 years ago.

It found the wild beavers on the south Devon river provided more benefits to people and the landscape than the costs they caused.

Good lord. Who among us could make the same claim. Have YOU ever solved more problems than you caused? Have I? Well I guess England is a mean judge of character. Because they’re backing this claim up with data.

Research by the team of scientists, overseen by Professor Richard Brazier from the University of Exeter, found they are providing benefits to people, including in the flood-prone community of East Budleigh.

Beavers have constructed six dams upstream of the village, which have measurably and significantly reduced peak flood flows through the community, the report said.

Evidence from another trial in north Devon, where beavers in an enclosure have built 13 dams and ponds, shows they also play a role in filtering soil, manure, slurry and fertilisers from farmland.

Despite concerns that beaver dams might affect fish populations, the research found that in the pools created by damming the streams there were 37% more fish than in comparable stretches of the river with no dams.

Get the hell out! 37% More fish in beaver ponds? It’s almost like putting a percent sign next to an actual fact makes it sound MORE true. (4 out of 5 dentists recommend sugarless gum for their patients who chew gum sort of thing). There are more fish in beaver ponds. 37% more. We counted and did the stats. Now do you believe us?

Devon Wildlife Trust’s Mark Elliott, who leads the River Otter Beaver Trial, said “I think we’ve all been surprised by these amazing animals’ ability to thrive, once again, in our wetland ecosystems.

“It also shows their unrivaled capacity to breathe new life into our rivers and wetlands, very few of which are in good health.”

Unrivaled the right word, Mark. What they do has never been done by anyone else. Nobody does it better. No one else even comes close. Let beavers do their jobs and if you want to count up those jobs on your little clipboards go right ahead.

Excuse me. I feel a song coming on.

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ARE BEAVER DAMS REALLY DAMS AT ALL?

heidi08 Beaver ecological impact, Beavers and Nitrates, Beavers and Nitrogen removal October 23, 2019

Do you remember the beaver festival? Yes, I know it was a long, long time ago. But for the last two festivals artist Frogard Schmidt has been working with children on some lovely painted curtains that will ultimately go behind the stage, Well I hard from her the other day that their finished touching up and weatherizing and she’s dropping them off tomorrow. She sent a little snap shot that I knew you’d want to appreciate.

Isn’t that awesome? Doesn’t Martinez have the best child artists and the most gently repairing art instructor in the entire world? I just love the “Enter” and “exit” reminders on the lodge. (Because you wouldn’t want to forget and have beavers bumping into each other.) It’s going to look FANTASTIC on stage. I can’t wait to see them in person.

Time again for another fabulous article on beavers that doesn’t know its about beavers from our friends at Phys.org. Apparently the University of Delaware in for a big surprise.

Antiquated dams hold key to water quality

All over the eastern part of the United States, thousands of small dams block the flow of water in streams and rivers, harkening back to colonial times. Originally constructed for energy and milling operations by settlers or companies, most of the milldams no longer serve human purposes. Now, many of these inactive dams are being removed by government and private agencies—driven by a need or hope of increasing public safety, reducing liability and improving aquatic habitats.

However, less attention is being paid to whether removing the dams will harm water quality, which is precisely what University of Delaware Professor Shreeram Inamdar is investigating. As the researcher explains, blocking the water unintentionally provides a valuable benefit. Soil upstream of the dam becomes richer in carbon, which acts as an important filter of nitrogen, a key pollutant in our nation’s waterways.

Of course this article is talking about the importance of “Mill Dams” and you know we’re thinking of another kind of small dam entirely. I guess I’m going to need one of the many graduate students working on this research to sit down and explain to me why a beaver dam is any fucking different. And why they aren’t broadening their research to include the removal and destruction of the tens of thousands of beaver dams that are taken out every year by responsible cities and landowners just “Doing the right thing” for their property.

“This natural filtering service reduces stream water nitrogen concentrations, improves water quality and saves limited conservation resources,” said Inamdar, who serves as director of UD’s Water Science and Policy Graduate Program.

The rapid response grant focuses on the effects of milldam removal on riparian (riverside) groundwater and stream water quality in Pennsylvania, which has the highest dam removal rate of any state. Dam removals could potentially undermine this filtering service, which is valuable to ecosystems, and increase the cost of cleaning up waterways. On the other hand, removal of dams could introduce a more dynamic groundwater regime—like greater fluctuations of water levels in stream-side soils leading to potentially greater processing and removal of nitrogen. Determining which of these two scenarios happen is the focus of the study.

So removing dams is bad in many ways, And thank goodness we’re here with a crack team of researchers to tell you which is worse. I mean it would be one thing if there were skilled teams on hand responsible for all these dams and making repairs every time one faltered night after night and costing us nothing. But that’s impossible. Of course progress and human infrastructure demands that we keep on ripping out beaver dams anyway.

I guess it’s nice of you to admit it matters.

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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.

PROTECTING WETLANDS

heidi08 Beavers and Nitrates January 30, 2018

A few reminders came this morning of how valuable beaver habitat can be. Here is an actual headline from Alberta:

Province taking extra steps to protect wetlands near S.W. ring road

The company constructing the southwest portion of the ring road has been ordered to protect Beaver Pond and put in extra time monitoring of the wetlands. KGL Constructors and Alberta Transportation will monitor the water quality and quantity in the pond.

The decision follows the Environmental Appeals Board reviewing the situation, after concerns were launched by residents in the area and the group YYC Cares. Jeff Brookman, with the group, is pleased with the province’s actions.

Be careful of the beaver pond! We talked about this group months ago when they protested work on the ring road threatening their beaver pond. Now they won the right to insist that those wetlands be protected. Good for them!

Wetlands are important. And good for business as this research shows.

Study shows wetlands provide landscape-scale reduction in nitrogen pollution

High nitrate concentrations in waterways can be harmful to ecosystems and human health, contaminating drinking water and eventually flowing downstream far enough to increase the size of the Gulf of Mexico’s “dead zone.”

A study published today in the journal Nature Geoscience by National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded researchers offers new insights into this problem: Multiple wetlands, or “wetland complexes” in a watershed, are extremely effective at reducing nitrate levels in rivers and streams.

Wetland complexes can be five times better at reducing nitrate than the best land-based nitrogen mitigation strategies, the scientists say.

Honestly, I sometimes feel like all these researchers are beaver lobbyists without knowing it. Certainly they promote the very things beavers are blamed for doing every day. Recently I started to think about what it would be like if beavers had a ‘business card’ they could present to recommend their services. I came up with this which amused me very much.