You know sometimes the science site phys.org prints articles are obviously about beavers without saying anything about the beavers themselves? You know they’ll be some headline like “coppicing trees makes more habitat for songbirds” or “Dense woody material piled at intervals in streams creates a better invertebrate population which leads to fatter fish“. It’s kind of become a running joke around here. But this is the most egregious example I believe I’ve ever seen.
Adding multiple smaller wetlands to the landscape can make large reservoirs more effective at flood control, according to a new study from Tulane University published in Environmental Research Letters.
Using the Brazos River basin in Texas as a case study, researchers modeled more than 140 wetland scenarios and compared performance against existing dams. They found a series of decentralized wetlands provide significant cumulative flood reduction and additional storage.
“Our analysis provides science on how to plan nature-based solutions to improve efficiency of built infrastructure,” said lead investigator Reepal Shah, a research scientist at Tulane University’s Bywater Institute. “Properly sited wetland portfolios can provide comparable flood mitigation on a per-storage basis.”
You are kidding me! Multiple small wetlands are better than one big one? Well how the heck are we supposed to find funding for that? It’s not like we can just magically make them appear or that money grows on willow trees!
Key findings of the study include:
Multiple small wetlands offer greater cumulative benefit than a single large wetland of the same total area, highlighting the value of distributed natural infrastructure.
Wetlands ranked by flood storage capacity and sequentially added to portfolios provide diminishing returns after approximately 30 sites, indicating not all wetlands perform equally.
The top 18 wetlands could expand the basin’s flood pool by 10% of the largest reservoir’s capacity, showcasing wetlands’ potential as complementary storage.
An index comparing impact per unit storage found well-designed wetlands efficacy is comparable to existing dams in flood control efficacy.
“This suggests wetland construction may relieve pressure on aging reservoir systems if done strategically,” said John Sabo, co-author and director of the Bywater Institute. “The findings can help practitioners identify robust wetland portfolios to sequence implementation and maximize gains.”
The modeling framework couples established land surface and hydrodynamic models to assess flood mitigation outcomes under different wetland scenarios. The researchers plan to further refine the approach and engage stakeholders on utilizing natural infrastructure to improve basin flood resilience.
The findings have important implications for flood management strategies globally. By incorporating strategically placed wetlands into existing infrastructure, communities can enhance their resilience to flooding events. This approach not only provides additional floodstorage capacity but also promotes the preservation and restoration of natural ecosystems.
You are pulling my leg! You mean that dotting wetlands around in areas can reduce the impacts of flooding caused by climate change? Gosh!
If only there were some free way to create wetlands without paying for them…you know like some kind of thing that could make them and maintain them and fix them for free….
A Eurasian beaver family will be getting new neighbours to help protect an additional stretch of Finchingfield Brook. The Essex project is to build two, new, 50-acre enclosures in preparation for more beaver families. The new arrivals will extend the amazing work of their cousins, introduced to the Estate in 2019, who have already transformed a woodland into a thriving wetland. The unprecedented £350,000 scale-up is jointly supported by Anglian Water, the Environment Agency, the Anglian Eastern Regional Flood and Coastal Committee (RFCC), Essex County Council and Essex and Suffolk Water in an innovative partnership funding approach.
The two new enclosures, along the Finchingfield Brook, will measure 1.9km long cover 40 hectares (100 acres), 10 times the size of the original enclosure, which was built in 2019. Preparations for the project are already underway with two new beaver families expected to be re-introduced in Spring 2023.
Archie Ruggles-Brise, Spains Hall Estate manager said:
“The chance to bring more natural engineering skills to the estate is beyond exciting. Since 2019 we’ve seen what beavers can do to reduce flood risk, increase drought resilience, clean water and create year-round habitat for wildlife. Now, thanks to the incredible support of our partners, we can supersize these benefits.
“With a massive new area to work in the beavers will help make the Finchingfield area more able to weather the changes climate change will bring, and all the while providing inspiration and experience that others can use elsewhere. For the estate this means we can keep pushing the boundaries of what can be done on private land, if you are willing to be open about working with others and offer a compelling vision.”
Acting as nature’s engineers, the beavers have helped to completely transform the landscape around them. The dams have played a crucial role in reducing flood risk in the area by slowing down the river flow and channelling it through new channels and wetlands.
Throughout this year’s drought, the dams also helped the river flows by slowly releasing retained water, helping to protect local wildlife. We hope these new beavers settle in and breed as successfully as the original pair, who produced three sets of kits.”
Environment Agency lead on the project Matt Butcher said:
“It’s great to see this project go from strength to strength providing real benefits to the local environment and community.
“The beavers have shown what effective flood engineers they are in the past few years and it’ll be great to extend this to a wider area.”
Dr Robin Price, Director of Quality and Environment for Anglian Water said:
“The effects of climate change including the risk of drought and flooding are felt more keenly in the East of England more than anywhere else in the UK. We need to find new and better ways of dealing with the challenges they bring while continuing to protect homes and businesses– and what better way to approach the problem of flooding here in Finchingfield than this wonderful, nature-based solution.
“Restoring natural habitat in such a purposeful way is also at the heart of Anglian Water’s Get River Positive commitment and we are proud to be supporting the next stage of Archie’s vision for Spains Hall Estate.”
Cllr Peter Schwier, Climate Czar at Essex County Council said:
“Essex County Council has been involved in the Essex Beaver project from the very beginning, providing administrative assistance and advice on water courses, so we are very pleased this project is proving so successful.
“Our work with all partners involved in this project means we are improving space and habitat for wildlife, while at the same time the work of the beavers is mitigating flooding, two of the key priorities contained in the Everyone’s Essex Green Infrastructure Strategy.
“Beavers are productive and useful and an honour to have in the beautiful Essex countryside.”
Richard Powell, Chair of the Regional Flood and Coastal Committee said:
“We are once again delighted to be part of the estate’s work, using flood risk funding to deliver nature based solutions is in all our interests. This project will deliver so much more than reduced flooding, creating invaluable wetland habitat as an oasis in the East Anglian landscape.”
Tom Harris, Catchment Advisor at Essex & Suffolk Water said:
“We’re delighted to be able to support the next phase of this exciting project, expanding significantly on the good work that the beavers have already carried out, turning their areas of the Estate into wild wetlands – providing huge benefits for biodiversity as well as slowing the flow in the catchment.
“Having the Spain’s Hall estate situated in one of our key raw water catchments has given us a fantastic opportunity to develop our ongoing work with catchment landowners, bringing multiple benefits for water quality, the local environment and their businesses. We are truly looking forward to the continuation of our partnership with the fantastic team at Spains Hall.”
To find out more about this fantastic project, please visit: Anglian Water
Please join with 250 non-profit organizations, scientists and advocates who submitted this letter to President Biden on February 27, 2023 asking for an Executive Order to protect beaver on our federally managed public lands as a proactive emergency climate response!
This petition will close on May 31, 2023 and be prepared for submission to the Biden Administration.
Ending beaver trapping and hunting on our federally managed public lands is a nature-based climate solution that will help restore many of our streams and wetlands, and bring real, tangible benefits to our communities.
Drought, floods, wildfires, and crashing fish and wildlife populations are no longer confined to small areas but spill across state boundaries. State wildlife agencies have failed to act in our best collective interest as they continue to narrowly focus on select recreational user groups even as our human and wild communities are increasingly stressed by the accelerating impacts of climate change and biodiversity loss. It is time for action at the national level.
Benefits include: More dependable water for cities, towns, farms and ranches; natural water filtration systems resulting in improved water quality; natural firebreaks creating refuges for wildlife during wildfires and protecting water quality post fire; temporary surface and groundwater storage that dampens flood peaks and improves stream flows during droughts; abundant quality fish and wildlife habitat; and drawdown of atmospheric carbon as wetland habitat expands.
Beavers can help us meet the challenges before us but only if we protect them. It is time to ask the President to take action as a matter of national security. Time is of the essence.
Matt Kaminski stood on a road scarcely higher than the floodplain, glassy pools on all sides stretched out like something from a dream. In the distance, a storm lumbered over the Coast Ranges.
The marsh all around him, Kaminski said, was a window into the Central Valley’s past. Back then, the waterways that twist down from the Sierra Nevada mountains would flood unrestricted by the current thicket of dams, canals and levees.
The more you know about rivers, the less confidence you have in a mapmaker’s static squiggle. Kaminski, a biologist from Ducks Unlimited who helps oversee the floodplain and, when it dries out, the grasslands, explained that when “the state of California was wild, it had a lot more wetlands.”
During the rainiest years, the whole valley could transform into an enormous, shallow sea. Floodwaters would spread over the landscape and percolate through the soil into the aquifers beneath. Little aquatic creatures would make their home in the tules and migrating birds would stop to gorge on their long journeys in the spring and fall. The Valley oaks and Fremont cottonwoods would rise, improbably, out of the shallows.
That appeared to be happening just east of Gustine in Merced County, as yet another storm from the tropics approached the valley: The San Joaquin River seemed to spread out and create an ephemeral wetland, a natural process.
But Kaminski pointed to the edge of the water, where three concrete slabs jutted into the marsh, and little slats of wood controlled the flow under the dirt road to the other side.
This marsh hadn’t flooded on its own.
Instead, the wetland was an artifice on top of an artifice. Powerful California interests “reclaimed” the Central Valley’s wetlands in the 19th and early 20th centuries, draining them for agricultural use and transforming the landscape.
The vast majority of the state’s marshes are gone.
But in little pockets in the state, people like Kaminski are reworking the land yet again to bring back a version of California’s past, in service of the future. By allowing rivers to spread out, flows are diverted from downstream communities, replenishing groundwater and staving off unwanted floods.
“These wetlands,” Kaminski likes to say, “act as a sponge.”
And the state agreed. In September, the California Wildlife Conservation Board earmarked $40 million for the nonprofit River Partners to spend on similar projects in the San Joaquin Valley.
But in the governor’s proposed budget released in January, that funding was axed. The news came early in the procession of climate-change-fueled winter storms that have led to staggering snowpack in the Sierra, extensive flooding throughout the state and more than 30 deaths. Facing a budget shortfall, Gov. Gavin Newsom had moved to kneecap efforts to use the historical floodplain as a way to recharge groundwater and to prevent disasters in human-occupied areas.
“In the San Joaquin Valley, we’ve got a product pipeline of about $200 million worth of floodplain expansion projects that are ready to go,” said Julie Rentner, president of River Partners. But the proposed budget, she said, “has zero dollars to be used towards that pipeline.”
Rentner said that habitat restoration cannot wait.
Well I certainly agree that habitat restoration cannot wait! But I still don’t understand why they didn’t mention our potential to do much of this fixing up for free? We’re certainly at work in the San Joaquin River Ecological Reserve! We got some good press on the BBC though:
Researchers in Poland have found another reason to love beavers: They benefit wintering birds.
The rodents, once maligned as destructive pests, have been getting a lot of positive press lately. And for good reason. Beavers are ecosystem engineers. As they gather trees and dam waterways, they create wetlands, increase soil moisture, and allow more light to reach the ground. That drives the growth of herbaceous and shrubby vegetation, which benefits numerous animals.
Bats, who enjoy the buffet of insects found along beaver ponds, are among the beneficiaries. So too are butterflies who come for the diversity of flowering plants in the meadows beavers create.
Some previous research has found that this helping hand also extends to birds. For example, a 2008 study in the western United States showed that the vegetation that grows along beaver-influenced streams provided needed habitat for migratory songbirds, many of whom are in decline.
A beaver dam in Bierbza Marshes, Poland. Photo: Francesco Veronesi (CC BY-SA 2.0)
The new study published in the journal Forest Ecology and Management found further evidence by focusing on birds in winter. The researchers looked at assemblages of wintering birds on 65 beaver sites and 65 reference sites in a range of temperate forest habitat across Poland. Winter can be a challenging time for birds in that environment, as they need to reduce energy expenditures in the cold weather and find habitat that has high-quality food and roosting sites.
Wintering birds, it turns out, find those qualities near beaver habitat.
The researchers found a greater abundance of birds and more species richness near areas where beavers had modified waterways. Both were highest closest to the shores of beaver ponds.
“All beaver-induced modifications of the existing habitat may have influence on bird assemblage,” says Michal Ciach, a study co-author and a professor in the department of Forest Biodiversity at the University of Agriculture in Krakow, Poland. “But different bird species may rely on different habitat traits that emerge due to beaver activity. It’s like a supermarket.”
The Eurasian beaver. Photo: Per Harald Olsen/NTNU (CC BY 2.0)
The growing research about beavers suggests a greater need to protect their habitat and understand their important role in the ecosystem.
“Beaver sites should be treated as small nature reserves,” says Ciach. “The beaver, like no other species, is our ally in stopping the decline of biodiversity.”
The City of St. Albert is upping its engineering-ante in an ongoing duel with the local beaver population by installing some new water infrastructure safeguards over the next few years.
The City of St. Albert plans to add a couple of new tools to its water-management tool belt over the next few years to counteract problems caused by the local beaver population.
Melissa Logan, the city’s environmental coordinator, said staff will install pond levellers in high-priority spots throughout Carrot Creek and the Sturgeon River, starting this summer.
Unbeknownst to the estimated 16 individual beavers who call these rivers home, pond levellers allow water to flow through dams to prevent flooding, Logan said.
“The pond levellers you can put right in the middle of a dam and it will keep the water flowing through so that we don’t get flooding, but still allow the beaver to create some of the habitat that it needs,” she said.
“It’s just a method of coexisting with beavers on the landscape instead of getting rid of them entirely.”
City staff are getting some new tools to counteract regular infrastructure damage caused by the estimated 16 local beavers. FILE/Photo
“Best-case scenario is that beavers are still able to be active on the landscape and do their natural water management,” Logan said of what she hopes the new tools will accomplish.
“Protection of our infrastructure in the long term is really what we’re looking for.”
Logan said staff will install the tools in high-priority areas this summer, and in lower priority areas over the next few years.
Major cost savings
Glynnis Hood, an environmental biology and ecology professor at the University of Alberta’s Augustana campus in Camrose and author of The Beaver Manifesto (2011), told The Gazette she has seen pond levellers save municipalities thousands of dollars.
“There’s cost savings, there’s ecological advantages, (and) there’s infrastructure advantages for reducing maintenance needs,” said Hood.
“For instance, in Cooking Lake-Blackfoot, we installed about 13 (pond levellers) and then we monitored them over seven years. The maintenance that was required … was maybe pull a few sticks out here and there and they worked really well,” she said.
“The cost savings was in the tens of thousands of dollars, and if we added on some other economic drivers … it could even be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars of cost savings just for those 13 sites that otherwise have been chronically flooded for over 10 years.”
Hood said pond levellers, culvert protectors, and other beaver-damage mitigation can improve how people in the community view their neighbourhood beavers.
Beavers as extreme-weather mitigators
As part of an ongoing five-year project, Hood and Dr. Cherie Westbrook from the University of Saskatchewan are studying how beavers and their dams might help mitigate extreme climate events, such as floods and droughts.
“Over 60 per cent of the beaver dams actually held even in the 2013 flood that devastated Calgary and downstream areas,” she said. “Many of the beaver dams were only partially breached or didn’t breach at all.”
“They actually played a role in holding back some of that floodwater or at least delayed or slowed its downstream flow.”
Hood said it’s too early to say definitively if beaver dams could be a significant tool during extreme-weather events in Alberta, but current data and modelling looks promising.
“In climate change, you’re going to get more extreme-weather events, like these big rainfall events, but you’re also going to get drought, and beavers (might) play a role in a natural and nature-based solution for some of these things.”
To learn more about beavers and, as Logan described, their unmatched water management engineering ability, Hood was recently featured in a TED-Talk YouTube video.
The recent winter storms on the Central Coast didn’t just affect humans — they’ve also damaged the habitat of the local beaver population.
Audrey Taub is the Executive Director of the SLO Beaver Brigade, who describe themselves as “beaver advocates.” It’s a group of local biologists, science enthusiasts and community members who educate people about the rodents and the role they play in our ecosystem.
While talking and teaching about beavers is often a joyful experience, Taub said there has been some sad news recently about local beaver populations.
“The big rains pretty much washed everything out. This particular storm definitely displaced them,” Taub said.
“We found one dead juvenile. So they really can’t live on their own until they’re at least two. So these one-year-olds just didn’t have a chance.”
The SLO Beaver Brigade helped paint, “The Beaver Mural” on a local coffee shop they meet at once a week.
Taub said after the heavy rain, local beavers will have to rebuild their dams in places like streams and ponds. She said it’s not clear how long that will take, but she’s “excited for the whole community to watch the ponds develop,” Taub said.
Beavers play a major role in fighting climate change by building dams, which helps create and restore wetlands.
That’s important, because it’s estimated that globally, wetlands can store about 190 million cars’ worth of emissions every year.
Cooper Lienhart is the SLO Beaver Brigade’s Restorations Director.
“I used to think we would engineer our way out of the problem and make synthetic trees to suck CO2 back out of the atmosphere. But yeah, I learned that wetlands are [the] most efficient land ecosystem at absorbing and storing CO2,” Lienhart said.
Last week the SLO Beaver Brigade received the California Coastal Commission’s WHALE TAIL grant. Taub and Lienhart said the money will be used to offer educational tours, river cleanups, and translations for Spanish-speakers interested in learning about beavers.
More information on the emissions-fighting rodents is online at slobeaverbrigade.com.
Read the whole article here.
And there is more news from the SLO Beaver Brigade: The First Annual SLO County Beaver Festival!
Beaver Festival Info:
The SLO Beaver Brigade invites eager beavers of all ages to the First Annual SLO County Beaver Festival on Saturday April 1 in SLO Mission Plaza from 10 am to 3 pm. Kids are welcome and encouraged to come learn about beavers with us! The festival will be a celebration of our local beavers with live music, speakers, food and drink, educational displays, crafts and games, and local booths
Why do we celebrate beavers? Because we see them as climate change superheroes! Beavers build dams in our creeks and rivers, turning them into lush wetlands. This SLOWS the water down, allowing it to SPREAD out and SINK into our aquifers (slow it, spread it, sink it)! Not only does this help us in droughts, but their wetlands also create refuge from wildfires. Come join us on April 1st to learn about all this and more at our first ever SLO Beaver Festival.
And for the last bit of news, there is a very lively and informative interview with Ben Goldfarb by Taya Jae at The Pen and The Sword.
I listened last night to an interview with WP weather editor Kasha Patel who talked about the impact of these moonsoony rains on California. Really listened. And I heard her say something that made a lot of sense. Namely that the strange pattern of long dry spells and flash rain has changed our soil. Really changed the way it works. Made it harder and less likely to absorb water. Made it more like places of flash floods and cracked soil. And then I remembered this:
In 1950,governmentagentsproposedtogetridofprairiedogsonsomepartsoftheNavajoReservationinordertoprotecttherootsofsparsedesertgrassesandtherebymaintainsomemarginalgrazingforsheep.
In California there is now no one left to cry for the rain.
Our many years of drought has made our soil impervious to water. The ground is hard and cracked with heat, Jon says on his walk in the hills the mud is barely sticking to his shoes. Even now with everything that is pouring from the sky. The very earth beneath us has changed. Nothing from the sky comes all year to to make our soil receptive and remind it why to hold onto the water that falls.
Only it’s not just climate change that’s to blame. And not our faltering snow pack. We killed the prairie dogs, and we just as righteously exterminated and continue to kill off the handiwork of their fellow keystone species who could help:
Wetlands offer greater cumulative benefit for flood control: Study
You are pulling my leg! You mean that dotting wetlands around in areas can reduce the impacts of flooding caused by climate change? Gosh!
