It’s funny how beaver news cycles come in waves, and suddenly everyone wakes up and starts talking about the same thing. Ooh beavers are good for salmon! Oooh beaver dams can reduce flooding! Oooh beaver dams remove nitrogen! And then one day the obvious occurs to them.
OOH BEAVER DAMS CAN HELP PREVENT FIRE!!!
Beavers, Water, and Fire—A New Formula for Success
Low-tech stream restoration works wonders for people and wildlife
And, importantly, these “emerald refuges” provide valuable wildlife habitat during wildfires, which are burning more frequently and more intensely across western landscapes.
How they work for people and wildlife
Streams need a steady “diet” of water, dirt, rocks and wood. These natural elements wash down during floods and slow a stream’s flow, spreading water across the landscape where it can be stored longer between flood events. Each stream’s diet is unique, based on its location, size, and the surrounding climate.
Unfortunately, most of the streams in the western U.S. have been structurally starved of wood (largely from a lack of beaver activity) for the last two centuries. Many of our waterways now flow fast and straight rather than storing water in the valley bottoms and floodplains that create riparian habitat.
By slowing and spreading water, low-tech structures boost soil moisture retention and raise water tables. This, in turn, provides protein-rich forbs and insects for birds, ungulates, and other wildlife. Reconnecting floodplains improves both surface and groundwater availability, and also lessens the erosive energy of floods. Boosting soil moisture and vegetation production keeps restored areas cooler when temperatures soar.
For these reasons, the National Wildlife Federation is exploring opportunities to expand low-tech restoration techniques onto the grasslands of eastern Montana, where late-summer water is in scarce supply for the greater sage-grouse and other species.
I can hear the beaver at his dam right now saying incredulously “You call this low tech?! You think all these branches just gnaw themselves?” But it’s wonderful to see the National Wildlife Federation praising the good work done by beavers. And hey it’s not just wildlife that needs beavers to help save them from fire. Turns out we’re pretty flammable too.
Water doesn’t burn
Ranchers have plenty of anecdotal stories of wildlife and livestock flocking to wet, green places when wildfires sweep across the West.
Recent wildfires in the West proved that wet habitat is invaluable as a refuge, and possibly as a firebreak, too: the only remaining green areas amidst miles of scorched rangeland were active beaver ponds that kept the flames at bay.
“Beavers and beaver dam analogs make a lot of sense for mitigating impacts during a fire,” says Wheaton.
Or avoiding one entirely.
It also makes sense to incorporate low-tech stream restoration into post-fire recovery efforts as a tool to protect and improve existing wet habitat. For instance, the Bureau of Land Management is planning to build low-tech structures to accelerate riparian recovery and mitigate mudslides during runoff after the Goose Creek Fire in Utah.
In northeast Nevada where the South Sugarloaf Fire scorched 230,000 acres this summer, the U.S. Forest Service is planning to use low-tech restoration to protect critical habitats that didn’t burn from potential damage during post-fire runoff and debris flows.
Similarly, the Idaho Department of Fish and Game is using low-tech estoration not just to protect critical habitats post-fire, but also to aid in ecosystem recovery on the recent Sharps Fire near Hailey.
In all these examples, the agencies hope to also study the effectiveness of low-tech restoration and to document the vegetation response at restored sites versus unrestored control sites. “If we’re making a difference at a scale that matters, then we should be able to see the positive impacts of low-tech stream restoration from space,” says Maestas.
Especially, he adds, as restored wet places stay greener longer.
So beaver benefits are so important and do so much good they’re visible from space? I totally believe. Certainly they’re obvious underwater. Or underground as the water table changes. Come to think of it, probably the only place where beaver benefits can’t be easily seen is here, on earth.
Sheesh.
In the 2018 anyway, at least. Ben Goldfarb was sent a really interesting paper this week about indigenous people using fire to manage the growth of forests and plants before we came and guess they also used it for?
The Role of Indigenous Burning in Land Management
Robin Wall Kimmerer and Frank Kanawha Lake
A 10- to 12-year fire interval was typically observed around beaver
ponds to maximize regeneration of aspen and willows to feed beaver
(Lewis 1982; Williams 2000a).
Yes that’s right. Beavers were recognized as so important on the landscape that it was customary to manage the aspen in such a way as to make sure they had enough to eat.
