Interesting article from Brooke Reyolds (no relation) in Annapolis Maryland, It had my attention all the way through the conclusion,
Brooke Reynolds: Do beavers have a place in modern America? | COMMENTARY
Before leather-booted colonists with their own rigid ideas of progress stepped onto the shores of America, beavers defined the landscape.
Since shortly after the last ice age ended, America’s riparian systems were defined by an intricate arrangement of seeps, bogs, wetlands, beaver dams, floodplains, and branching streams and rivers woven into a harmonious tapestry. The keystone species orchestrating this river dance was Castor canadensis, the American beaver.
Ooh now this is getting interesting. Gee I wonder what her conclusions will be?
Beavers were not only engineers, they were artists. Nearly every creek would have exhibited a chain of beaver dams, sculpting entire ecosystems of braided streams and wetlands. The natural system of beavers building and intermittently abandoning their dams provides many benefits: habitat creation, filtering pollutants, catching silt, preventing erosion, and encouraging groundwater infiltration and seepage that often results in cooler waters downstream.
Yes they did, But to be fair they probably didn’t;t have much pollution to remove in the 1799, Still, theirs was a different world than the one we inhabit today.
Before environmental regulation, demands for land resulted in building on sensitive habitat. Stormwater surface flow was sent to pipes and then out to the nearest stream, resulting in the straight, deep cuts of stream channels we see today. There was an incomplete understanding of the damage being done to floodplains, bogs, and marshes. How can we mimic the pristine ecosystems of the past in a time of anthropogenic impact?
Simply using beavers to perform the ecosystem services they once did seems like an obvious answer. However, we do not have sufficiently large beaver populations in Anne Arundel County or much of the East Coast to rely on them to restore streams to pre-colonial conditions. Dams require constant maintenance and a robust beaver population.
Underwood & Associates, a local ecosystem restoration company, created the Regenerative Stream Channel and Step Pool Stormwater Conveyance restoration methods to advance habitat recovery over time to closely approximate native ecosystems. These designs use biomimicry to achieve outcomes similar to beaver dams, incorporating a series of riffle weirs, sand seepage berms, and step pools that slow down and spread out water in a more predictable and sustainable manner than beaver impoundments. This results in the trapping and filtering of pollutants, enhanced floodplain connection, groundwater infiltration, erosion prevention, and habitat creation.
Although these systems can mimic the benefits of beavers, do these iconic mammals fit into restoration projects?
It is common for beavers to move into restoration sites after they are completed. The beavers will often begin building dams on top of existing weirs, which can raise the water level in ponds a few feet higher than restoration plans may have expected. The extra water may cause weirs to “blow out.”
A beaver-friendly restoration project must be hardy enough to accommodate the rising and falling of water levels as the beavers make their own modifications to the site. Underwood & Associates welcomes beavers that take up residence on all of our restoration sites, since our projects are created to be resilient enough to incorporate the changing conditions and fluctuations of nature.
AND it must be BEAVER FRIENDLY, Don’t forget that part. Its the rarest and the most important.,
If beavers are to have a place in the current landscape of modern America, we must make space for them. More land conservation is needed to provide ample habitat and connected stream systems for beavers to inhabit. Restoration projects should be designed with resiliency and adaptation in mind.
Non-jurisdictional (less than one acre) wetlands should rook be protected from degradation and development. Benefits would reverberate across our ecosystems if we could more clearly visualize and implement designs that re-create the knitted systems of the past where seeps and headwater streams meandered through wetlands, floodplains, and beaver impoundments. Restoration and conservation present our only opportunity to mend the modern landscape to regain a semblance of the days when beavers were the composers orchestrating the ecosystem.
Oh my goodness. What a FINE letter Brooke. We want to know who you work with because you make all the best points. I’m going to look her up right now. I think there. might be a beaver festival in her future,
