Category: Beavers and Nitrogen removal

IOWA STATE OFFERS BEAVER WEBINAR

heidi08 Beaver ecological impact, Beavers and Nitrogen removal, Beavers and soil January 24, 2023

This was a surprise. I have grown accustomed to a certain kind of beaver hydrology lecture, from earnest professors like Dr. Fairfax or charming wisdom fonts like Kent Woordruff or Brock Dolman or even classic new england types like Skip Lisle or Leila Philip. I never heard the beaver gospel delivered from anyone quite like Andrew Rupiper and his stalwart professor Dr. Billy Beck of Iowa State.

Something about the unaffectionate pragmatism works though.

Can Beavers Be Water Quality Superheroes?

AMES, Iowa – Iowa Learning Farms, in partnership with the Iowa Nutrient Research Center and Conservation Learning Group, is hosting a free virtual field day on Feb. 9 at 1 p.m. Central time. Join for a live discussion with Billy Beck, assistant professor and extension forestry specialist at Iowa State University and Andrew Rupiper, graduate research assistant in natural resources ecology and management at Iowa State University.

The event will explore a unique research project, located at the Ann Smeltzer Trust Iowa Learning Farm in Webster County, looking at a free in-stream conservation practice tying together water quality, wood and wildlife.

Funded by the Iowa Nutrient Research Center, the team is working to quantify hydrologic impacts of beaver dams in the stream system and their effect on nutrients and sediment to determine the influence, positive or negative, these ecosystem engineers have within their watershed.

Iowa isn’t exactly a place I would go to meet ecologists who care about beavers. But it’s a state that cares a lot about its SOIL and of course that means you’re very interested in the things that improve it and the things that wash it away. Turns out this is a natural precondition for being interested in beavers.

“Many of the stream channels in Iowa aren’t able to assist with nutrient and sediment reductions and may be sources instead due to the straightening of streams, removal of riparian vegetation, removed in-channel wood and added artificial drainage to the landscape,” noted Beck. “While contentious, beaver dams are a free in-stream conservation practice that could help improve water quality and reduce nutrient and sediment loads within the watershed.”

Webinar access instructions

To participate in the live webinar, shortly before 1 p.m. Central time Feb. 9:

To access online, click this URL, or visit https://www.iowalearningfarms.org/events-1.
To join from a dial-in phone line, dial +1 312 626 6799 or +1 646 876 9923; meeting ID 945 3331 7620.

The field day will be recorded and archived on the ILF website so that it can be watched at any time.

Participants may be eligible for a Certified Crop Adviser board-approved continuing education unit. Information about how to apply to receive the CEU (if approved) will be provided at the end of the event.

So Iowa State is having a webinar about beavers. Let that sink in. Roll it around in your mouth for a moment. First New Mexico. Then California. Then Colorado. Then Iowa. It’s not impossible to think that every state will come around eventually. If you can’t wait until February, watch this video with Andrew now. He says all the things we already know but in a completely different way for a very different audience.

And he does it really well.

More ‘Wild kingdom‘ than ‘Lily Pond’. More about soil than beavers. More about ecosystem services than engineers. More fact than furry.

It’s the right message to the right audience and I love it.

SACRAMENTO SAYS NICE THINGS ABOUT BEAVERS

heidi08 Beavers, Beavers and Nitrogen removal November 14, 2022

Doesn’t Jesus say something about the prophet being accepted everywhere but in his home town? Well let’s say that applies to beavers and Sacramento too, because they’ve been very slow to say anything nice about their once not-native rodent. That is until this morning, When they were on Cap radio.

A new study finds beaver dams can boost water quality during a drought

The beaver dam showed up right in the middle of Christian Dewey’s research site. As the lead of a Stanford study, Dewey spent months looking at water quality along the Colorado River. This river is a water source for numerous states aside from Colorado, including Arizona, Utah and California.

The dam re-directed the study. In the end, researchers unearthed a surprising finding: the beaver dam played an important part in improving water quality in the river – so much so that in some areas, it’s mitigating water degradation caused by drought and climate change.

Dewey observed the dam during the summer of 2018, a drought year for multiple states, including Colorado. Dewey said that when water levels are low, minerals tend to become concentrated in the river. This deterioration of water quality can have devastating ecological impacts.

One example of that degradation is a high level of nitrates in the water. When the mineral is too concentrated in a river, it can cause explosive algae growth. When that algae dies and begins to decay, it eats up “dissolved oxygen,” which refers to the level of oxygen in the water. This can negatively impact species throughout the surrounding ecosystem.

“When dissolved oxygen levels suddenly drop, those species become imperiled,” Dewey said. “If we have all these watersheds contributing nitrate to the Colorado River, then the more nitrate within each watershed that ends up downstream is potentially a problem.”

But as Dewey took samples of water downstream from the beaver dam, he realized that its quality was improving. The dam was pushing water out toward the sides of the river, where it would then have to move through soil before reentering.

“The soils then essentially acted as a filter and removed that nitrate,” he said. “And so the water discharged from the soils was lower in nitrate than it was when it entered the soils.”

Yes that’s the way it works. Pretty darn shocking for everyone that isn’t reading this website right now but I’ll bet sacramento was BESIDE themselves.

“Where our study site was up and near Crested Butte, Colorado, you can see pronounced beaver activity that you didn’t see 50 years ago,” said Fendorf. “These ecosystem responses, the rebound of the American Beaver, is actually having this really counter impact on the degradation we’re seeing from climate change.”

Fendorf said that different species play large roles in their environments – many of which researchers might not yet know about, as was the case with this finding.

“This is a sign of why it’s so important for us to have ecological preservation,” he said. “Healthy people [come] from having a healthy planet, meaning a healthy, thriving ecosystem.”

Well of course they do. I wrote Dr. Fendorf this weekend and introduced myself saying Worth A Dam had tons of video and photos documenting the difference beavers make in an urban streams and suggesting he let us know if we could help in anyway. And he wrote back much impressed and said he loved our name.

To which I said again, “Of course.”

MARTINEZ ON KGO: SAVING BEAVERS BEFORE IT WAS COOL

heidi08 Beavers, Beavers and Nitrogen removal November 12, 2022

My 94 year old uncle told me he saw this on the teevee the other night but I was driving home from the sierras and missed it. Amazing that there’s even a mention of Martinez! (And what sr=ure looks like my video clip from lo these many moons ago).

Stanford University study explains how beaver activity may have long-term benefits on climate change

The data comes at a time of increased interest in nurturing beaver activity, even in semi-urban settings like Martinez, where one celebrated group had discovered dam building in 2007. In a separate paper, Felicia Marcus, a Landreth Visiting Fellow at Stanford University’s Water in the West program, connects the dams to a drought strategy known as “nature based solutions.”

Well now I’m fine with being lumped in with the likes of Felicia Marcus but I just want to point out that Martinez was saving beavers 15 years before it was what all the cool kids were doing.

Trend setters. That’s us.

She says a number of states have set up programs to compensate land-owners where beaver activity damages property. Meanwhile Dewey and Fendorf are hoping their study will focus attention on how natural ecosystems could be stressed by drought and climate change in the future. And the benefits of supporting natural populations that might be able to help.

A number of states? I guess 1 is a number. Okay I’m counting Washington’s legislation waiting in the wings. And maybe something in Colorado. Anywhere else? I’m all ears.

What’s NOT to love about that sentence? Way to go professor Fendorf. I’m hoping all this nice media attention gets you inspired to chair another beaver dissertation soon – maybe something about how beavers on urban landscapes improve water quality or beaver depredation increases pollution.

BEAVERS CAN FIX IT FASTER THAN WE CAN BREAK IT

heidi08 Attitudes towards beavers, Beavers and climate change, Beavers and Nitrogen removal November 9, 2022

What a surprise this must have come to every researcher at Stanford and anyone that isn’t me, It’s. making headlines all over this morning and that’s definitely a plus for beavers and the people who’d like to see more of them.

Beavers will become a bigger boon to river water quality as U.S. West warms, Stanford study finds

American beaver populations are booming in the western United States as conditions grow hotter and drier. New research shows their prolific dam building benefits river water quality so much, it outweighs the damaging influence of climate-driven droughts.

Let that sink in for a moment. Feel better?

As climate change worsens water quality and threatens ecosystems, the famous dams of beavers may help lessen the damage.

That is the conclusion of a new study by Stanford University scientists and colleagues, publishing Nov. 8 in Nature Communications. The research reveals that when it comes to water quality in mountain watersheds, beaver dams can have a far greater influence than climate-driven, seasonal extremes in precipitation. The wooden barriers raise water levels upstream, diverting water into surrounding soils and secondary waterways, collectively called a riparian zone. These zones act like filters, straining out excess nutrients and contaminants before water re-enters the main channel downstream.

This beneficial influence of the big, bucktoothed, amphibious rodents looks set to grow in the years ahead. Although hotter, arid conditions wrought by climate change will lessen water quality, these same conditions have also contributed to a resurgence of the American beaver in the western United States, and consequently an explosion of dam building.

Yes a few of us can do you a world of good. But a battalion of us can do things you never dreamed of, Now stop killing us and let us get to work,

“Completely by luck, a beaver decided to build a dam at our study site,” said Dewey, who is now a postdoctoral scholar at Oregon State University (whose mascot, incidentally, is a beaver). “The construction of this beaver dam afforded us the opportunity to run a great natural experiment.”

Right, Because who would EVER go out on purpose to STUDY beaver dams, This was just a fluke. I had no idea they saved water and restored the aquifer and made microclimates. I went to Stanford not UTAH state.

To understand how beaver dams may affect water quality in a future where global warming produces more frequent droughts and extreme swings in rainfall, the researchers compared water quality along a stretch of the East River during a historically dry year, 2018, to water quality the following year, when water levels were unusually high. They also compared these yearlong datasets to water quality during the nearly three-month period, starting in late July 2018, when the beaver dam blocked the river.

Okay you compared a wet year to a dry year. I’m pretty sure that’s been done. But not at Stanford. So what did you find?

Through their measurements and computer modeling of the interlinked biological, chemical, and physical processes that affect how contaminants become concentrated or flow downstream, the researchers found that the beaver dam dramatically increased removal of nitrate, a form of nitrogen, by creating a surprisingly steep drop between the water levels above and below the dam.

Warm, dry summers following spring snowmelt also produce big level changes, which generate a pressure gradient that pushes water into surrounding soils. The larger the gradient, the greater the flow of water and nitrate into soils, where microbes transform nitrate into an innocuous gas.

In the East River, the researchers found the increase in the gradient compared to an average day was at least 10 times greater with the dam than it was during the summer peak without the dam, for both the high-water year (2019) and the drought year (2018). Stated otherwise, the effects of the dam exceeded climatic hydrological extremes – in either direction of drought or abundant snowmelt – by an order of magnitude.

“Beavers are countering water quality degradation and improving water quality by producing simulated hydrological extremes that dwarf what the climate is doing,” said Fendorf, who is the Terry Huffington Professor in the Stanford Doerr School of Sustaienability and a senior fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment

Do you hear that? Beavers are fixing our streams even FASTER than our climate can ruin them. That’s pretty darn fast,

“We would expect climate change to induce hydrological extremes and degradation of water quality during drought periods,” said Fendorf, “and in this study, we’re seeing that would have indeed been true if it weren’t for this other ecological change taking place, which is the beavers, their proliferating dams, and their growing populations.”

That nitrogen thing is a biggy I guess at Stanford. I mean when you add it to the list of all the other things beavers can do, like save water and increase biodiversity and save salmon and increase protection from FIRES it almost seems like a no brainer to keep as many of them as possible on the landscape

But what do I know?

WE DON’T NEED BEAVERS. WE CAN DO IT OURSELVES!

heidi08 Beavers, Beavers and Nitrates, Beavers and Nitrogen removal April 5, 2022

I’m sure you remember the exciting news that came a few years ago about beaver ponds removing nitrogen from soil, right? Well I’m not sure how I feel after comparing this recent article comparing it to Arthur Gold’s great study in 2017. I guess farmers will be more happy to make their own wetlands if they’re almost as effective as beaver ponds at removing nitrogen?

Small wetlands can have big impacts

In a new study, researchers have shown that wetlands built next to farmlands can dramatically reduce the amount of excess nutrients reaching aquatic environments.

“Even very small wetlands can be effective,” says Maria Lemke, lead researcher of the study at The Nature Conservancy.

The study was conducted over 12 years on a 272-acre farm in McLean County in central Illinois. Many farms in this part of the United States use tile drainage systems—a network of interconnected underground pipes that drain water from the farms.

“Our findings show that constructed wetlands can be very effective at reducing excess nitrogen losses from agricultural tile systems,” says Lemke. “We also show that these wetlands can capture dissolved phosphorus efficiently.”

Lemke and colleagues showed that wetlands as small as 3% of the tiled area draining into them can be effective. These wetlands catch excess nutrients draining from surrounding farmlands. This means less nutrients end up in streams and rivers, and ultimately, the ocean.

Really small. Say like “pond sized”. Like ohh say something a beaver might make. Though not an ACTUAL beaver because they’re icky.

Constructed wetlands can be a useful conservation practice that mitigates nutrient export from farms to aquatic ecosystems. Nitrogen runoff that enters wetlands comes in the form of dissolved compounds called nitrates. Microbes in wetlands can use these dissolved nitrates as energy sources.

These microbes convert the nitrates into harmless nitrogen gas, which is released into the atmosphere. Conversion from dissolved nitrate to nitrogen gas results in less nitrogen exiting the wetlands into aquatic ecosystems. “Wetlands provide the perfect habitats for microbes to perform this process,” says Lemke.

Phosphorus removal from farm drainage is a more complex process. Soil chemistry and clay content play important roles in removing dissolved phosphorus. “It’s important to analyze soils at potential wetland sites to characterize their long-term retention capacity for phosphorus,” says Lemke.

Even the smallest wetlands reduced nitrogen loss from farm tiles by 15 to 38%. As drainage water moved through a series of connected wetlands, nitrogen loss was increased up to 57%.

Sure beaver ponds do it BETTER and when the pond is damaged the beavers fix it for free but they’re so icky and unpredictable. No one wants them around. People just want beaver benefits without beavers. That’s possible right?

Beaver Ponds: Resurgent Nitrogen Sinks for Rural Watersheds in the Northeastern United States

Using the annual range of denitrification observed in our three ponds, we estimate that denitrification in beaver ponds that average 0.26 ha can annually remove 49 to 118 kg nitrate N km⁻² of catchment area. In beaver ponds that average 1 ha, denitrification can account for 187 to 454 kg nitrate N km⁻² of catchment area. Moore et al. (2004), using the SPARROW model, predicted total N catchment yields between 200 and 1000 kg km⁻² for undeveloped land uses (i.e., rural) in southern New England. Based on the beaver pond/watershed area ratios (0.18–0.7%), and interpond variability in denitrification, we estimate that beaver ponds in southern New England can remove 5 to 45% of watershed nitrate loading from rural watersheds with high N loading (i.e., 1000 kg km⁻²). Thus, beaver ponds represent an important sink for watershed nitrate if current beaver populations persist.

Well, okay, beavers are better, but to refer to my previous point. they’re icky. And so unpredictable.It’s much easier to do it without them.

“The idea is that if we combine in-field practices with edge-of-field wetlands, we may be able to decrease further the wetland sizes needed for desired nutrient reductions,” says Lemke.