Jon and I spent all day joking about the nasty “invasive mergansers” – sometimes very unpleasant things stay with you for a while. Luckily for us, this morning provides an antidote. Written by Brandon Keim in the glossy magazine “Anthropocene”. Don’t you wonder what the stats would say about our single family of beavers?

The tremendous benefits provided by just one beaver family

People already know that beavers are keystone species whose activities shape landscapes in broadly beneficial ways. If such descriptions sound a bit abstract, though, consider the observations of scientists who followed the activities of a single beaver pair living in the British countryside.

In a study published in the journal Earth Surface Processes and Landforms, researchers led by hydrologist Richard Brazier of the University of Exeter describe their measurements of sediment composition and water quality in ponds built by the beavers, who were released in 2011 as part of a species reintroduction effort. Beavers were extirpated from the British Isles about 400 years ago.

The beavers’ enclosure, roughly the size of three (American) football fields and situated on a stream below a farm, originally contained one small pond. Since their arrival the beavers have built 12 more ponds. Their enclosure is now a wetland mosaic regulated by dams and canals, and the ponds are slowly filling with sediment — 101 tons of it to date, estimate Brazier’s team.

Remind me to send Dr. Brazier a thank you note. His careful research has produced such helpful results that actually benefit from the extirpation of beaver for 400 years. Come to think of it, maybe I should send a thank you note to the entire United Kingdom, since there “should we or shouldn’t we” drama has helped move the beaver conversation forward in so many ways.

Some of that sediment was generated by the beavers’ own digging. The vast majority, though, is eroded soil from the adjacent farmland. Altogether the sediments contain 16 tons of carbon — representing, were every last ounce of it sequestered permanently, the average yearly carbon emissions of six British citizens.

Carbon aside, the beavers’ wetlands also filtered out one ton of nitrogen, which becomes a pollutant when released at high concentrations into riversheds, and prevented that eroded soil from becoming lost. A 2009 report estimated that agricultural soil erosion in the United Kingdom annually costs £45 million — $60 million in U.S. dollars — in damage. Beavers might offset that, suggest Brazier and colleagues, adding yet another line to the flood-controlling, biodiversity-promoting, recreation-enhancing ledger of their services.

Given the accomplishments of just one pair observed by Brazier’s team, the landscape-scale possibilities are enormous. Beavers can “deliver significant geomorphic modifications and result in changes to nutrient and sediment fluxes,” write the researchers, “limiting negative downstream impact” of agricultural pollution. To put it another way: beavers could help clean up our messes. The same applies to the rest of Eurasia, where beavers were eradicated from much of their historical range, and also North America, where their populations are now perhaps one-tenth of pre-colonial levels.

Nice work Brandan! That’s one fine summary of some very delicious research. What a great way to start the day off right. Not only can beavers fix what ails us, they can do so cheaply and efficiently on a massive scale. You would think everyone would be fighting over who gets them first, like the last Elmo doll at a Christmas sale.

Now if you haven’t already, and you live in California, go vote! Be careful of that jungle primary too.

Can the World Find Solutions to the Nitrogen Pollution Crisis?

The world is using nitrogen fertilizer less and less efficiently. A greater proportion than ever before is washing into rivers and oceans. An environmental catastrophe looms, nitrogen scientists say, and the world urgently needs to develop strategies to prevent it.

The bottom line, many there concluded, was that we must halve the amount of nitrogen we dump into the environment by mid-century or our ecosystems will face epidemics of toxic tides, lifeless rivers, and dead oceans. And that to do that will require, among other things, almost doubling the efficiency of nitrogen use on the world’s farms.

A man collects snails amid a nitrogen-fueled algae bloom in China’s eastern Jiangsu province. LIU JIN/AFP/Getty Image

Earth system scientists say nitrogen is the major factor in biogeochemical pollution, one of four “planetary boundaries” that we have exceeded, risking “irreversible and abrupt environmental change.” The world is attempting to address the other three: climate change, deforestation, and biodiversity loss. But, says Sutton, a British researcher at the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology in Edinburgh, nitrogen pollution is a largely ignored environmental story, with no international agreement or UN agency to galvanize action.

That fallout is all around us. In the United States, it is being felt in virtually all parts of the country — unleashing algal blooms in rivers from the Ohio to the Klamath in California; poisoning underground water reserves in California; leaving fish gasping for oxygen in Chesapeake Bay; and creating toxic “red tides” off the shores of Florida.

The Gulf of Mexico has a regular “dead zone,” where excess nitrogen stimulates so much aquatic plant growth that its eventual rotting consumes all the available oxygen, suffocating most other marine life. The zone arises from nitrogen pouring down the Mississippi from the grain fields of the Midwest. It typically extends each summer for 5,300 square miles. Last summer’s reached 8,800 square miles, the largest ever.

Raise your hand if you are thinking about the 2015 article by Lazar, Addy & Gold that observed that beaver ponds could remove as much as 45% nitrogen from the watershed. In fact they stepped so far into heresy as to suggest that nitrogen removal should be considered one of the Ecosystem Services provided by beaver, and should be weighed against any other damage they might cause before a decision was made as to their removal.

Sure. there are other things farmers can do to reduce nitrogen. They can apply it more carefully only at the roots of the plants or use some of their land to create retention ponds of their own. But it’s not very hard to imagine there will eventally be some kind of formulae saying every so many acres you farm requires a nitrogen removal system in place.

Why wouldn’t any farmer vote to have that be beavers who will do it for free?