BEAVER RESEARCH: FULLY FUNDED

heidi08 Beaver ponds, Beavers, Beavers and Flooding, Beavers and water September 1, 2020

We’re officially caught up with beaver news. For a month I have had a stack of articles waiting to tell you about because apparently August is the right time for good beaver news. Now it’s September and we’re moving into the days soon of BAD beaver news. Beavers in the fall are raising their dams and people are getting worried about flooding. Soon we’ll hear about the reasons folks in Wichita or Boise need to trap.

But there’s one last victory to celebrate.

Funding for prospective students

Dam beavers: quantifying the impacts of nature’s water engineers on the fluvial geomorphology and flood regimes of streams and rivers, Geography – PhD (Funded)

The University of Exeter’s College of Life and Environmental Sciences, in partnership with the National Trust, is inviting applications for a fully-funded PhD studentship to commence in October 2020 or as soon as possible thereafter. For eligible students the studentship will cover UK/EU tuition fees plus an annual tax-free stipend of at least £15,285 for 4 years full-time, or pro rata for part-time study. The student would be based in Geography in the College of Life and Environmental Sciences at the Streatham Campus in Exeter.

The Eurasian Beaver (Castor Fiber) was hunted to extinction in Great Britain and near-extinction in Europe. Over recent decades, it has made a comeback, with numbers now nearing 1 million in mainland Europe and with a number of reintroductions and licensed trials established in GB to improve understanding of the role that this ecosystem engineer might play if more widespread. Since beavers were absent from GB, landscapes have been modified extensively in support of agricultural intensification, with an emphasis upon the drainage of the land to deliver enhanced production of food. Waterways are now straightened and deepened, fields under-drained and often bare of vegetation, to maximise drainage efficiency, but with detrimental impacts downstream. Thus, there are very few, if any ‘natural’ streams or rivers in GB, which means that research is required to understand what impact beavers might deliver, as they return into densely populated, intensively-farmed ecosystems. This PhD will deliver new understanding of the ways in which streams and channels will respond to beaver activity and will therefore provide fundamental science to guide both decision and policymakers and land managers as to how to respond.

How much do you want to be THIS PhD candidate? Hired to measure streams or walk around dams for 4 years as a fully funded doctoral student? Knowing that your dissertation is guaranteed to break ground and change the country for decades to come?

The overall aim of this project is to quantify the impacts that beavers will have on the fluvial geomorphology and flood regimes of a wide range of surface waters in Great Britain. It is noted here that the PhD student will both refine and redesign this project, as their ownership of the research develops, however we have established the following hypotheses to test:
1. Beaver activity (particularly beaver dams) will force channel-planform change across a range of stream orders (at least 1st to 4th), increasing sinuosity, decreasing width:depth ratios and increasing the presence of multi-thread channels in the landscape, which engage more regularly with floodplains.
2. Within-channel bed characteristics will be significantly altered via beaver dam construction, with along-channel heterogeneity of bed material increasing; becoming finer upstream of dams and coarser downstream.
3. Channel long-profiles will be altered towards more step-formed geometry due to the presence of beaver dams and these geomorphic changes will persist, delivering changes to hydraulic behaviour along beaver-dammed reaches, when compared with non-dammed reaches.
4. Beaver dammed channels will deliver flow attenuation, reducing peak flows and increasing lag times in a comparable manner to more conventional natural flood management techniques such as woody debris dams.

The project will deploy a Multiple Before-After-Control-Impact experimental design, deploying methods including: ground-based surveys, structure-from-motion drone-based photogrammetry, hydrological monitoring, suspended sediment and bedload monitoring, numerical modelling and GIS.

Oh my goodness. Something tells me excited grad students across the country are lining up to pack their wellies and do this work themselves! Great job Richard Brazier and Alan Puttock. We can’t see to hear who you chose and what the find!

My work is entirely unfunded, but as you can see, it’s still productive. Now we just need to bring in some real artists.

VICTORY FOR BEAVERS

heidi08 Beavers and Flooding, Beavers and water December 8, 2017

Now that’s what I call a good beaver news day! Sunday Times, Yahoo, Huffington Post and Politico. All with headlines about how beavers help the environment. I’m pretty ambitious, and am reminded of a very old joke that went something like this

“What do you call 50 politicians at the bottom of the ocean?”

“A good START,”

If all this news follows the decision to reintroduce a single family of beaver back into the Forest Dean, I can only hope the success is trickled out over decades city by city, farm by farm so that we have this news cycle every month. Don’t rush into anything England. We in the beaver community want this to last a good long time!

Beavers returned to Forest of Dean as solution to flooding

Beavers are to return to the Forest of Dean after an absence of 400 years under a plan to use their dam-building abilities to reduce flood risk. Michael Gove, the environment secretary, has approved plans to release a family of two adult beavers and two kits into a 16-acre enclosure on Greathough Brook near the village of Lydbrook in the spring.

The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs said that many more beavers could be reintroduced in other areas. It is publishing guidance today to help organisations to make applications for “further trial releases across England”.

Scientists have said that the beavers could help to protect Lydbrook in a “nature-based solution” to the flooding. In 2012 Lydbrook’s town centre was flooded up to 4ft deep, despite being almost half a mile from the River Wye.

A pair released a few years ago into a stream in Devon built 13 dams that increased the amount of water stored behind them by more than 200,000 gallons. Beavers build dams to create ponds in which they feel safe from predators.

This is not only great news for beavers, its pretty dam good news for science. Researchers at Exeter studied the issue closely, published their findings and the right people listened. How often does that happen honestly? Imagine how proud you would be if you were the grad student working on this research!

Derek Gow, a beaver expert who has worked on other reintroduction trials, said that water took ten times longer to flow through beaver-generated wetlands than in rivers and streams without them. “Beaver-generated environments therefore not only regulate flows reducing flood peaks but also function as storage facilities for water, which can also assist in the alleviation of drought,” he said.

They also help to restore other wildlife, including insects and amphibians, by creating new wetland habitat, he added. “Reintroducing the beaver is therefore a very good idea from an ecological perspective at a time when many studies demonstrate life in intensively farmed western European landscapes dissipating at a bewildering speed.”

Wonderful Derek! This is a great day for beavers, and your work on their behalf has done good in places you might not even consider. Headlines are still pouring into my mailbox as I type this. I know we’re supposed to root for the final decision to be made, like waking up on Christmas morning with everything glistening and in place – but eeking it out is sooo good.

Let’s stay ‘Beaver Eve” for ever, okay?

Move over HCN, this might be the best beaver article EVER.

heidi08 Beavers, Beavers and Birds, Beavers and climate change, Beavers and Forests, Beavers and Frogs, Beavers and Insects, Beavers and salmon, Beavers and trout, Beavers and water, Beavers elsewhere, Who's saving beavers now? October 7, 2016

Shhh.

Come in and close the door. Are we alone?

I’m going to share something fine and rare, like a glass of the extraordinary 1811 Château d’Yquem. And your job is to snif the boquet, hold it up to the light, and slowly savor every amber moment. Do not guzzle this down and look for the next article or the one after that. This is the best article.

The. Very. Best.

Beavers are back in the UK and they will reshape the land.

Alex Riley: BBC Earth

On a June morning with a thin cover of cloud above, I was here [in Devon] to meet Richard Brazier, an environmental scientist from University of Exeter, and his post-doctoral colleague Alan Puttock. They are running a one-of-a-kind outdoor experiment.

Today, things have changed. The undergrowth is overgrown. Lopsided willow trees dominate, sending hundreds of shoots and stems into the air, each pining for the light above. A thick blanket of green foliage erupts from the peaty soil. Flora is blossoming, fauna flourishing. With their long cascade of pink bells, foxgloves rise high from the purple moor grass below. Butterflies and bees flutter from flower to flower.

“The biodiversity is booming,” Brazier tells me as we approach the wire fence through a field of coarse grass and rushes. “It’s alive.”

Behind this fence, every species – plant and animal– depends on the behaviour of just one: the Eurasian beaver. Since their introduction in March 2011, a breeding pair of these large rodents has been as busy as, well, beavers.

They have raised a family. They have built a lodge to live in and gouged deep canals through the land for getting out and about. And, of course, they have chopped down trees and built a series of 13 dams from sticks and mud. The woodland stream has been, and is being, transmogrified into wetland.

It is easy to see why beaver are known as “ecosystem engineers”. But it is Brazier and Puttock’s task to find out what these large rodents are engineering exactly.

“When this animal existed in the tens of millions in Western Europe and Eurasia, it was a dominant landscape force, in the way that wind and water and fire are,” says Derek Gow, a beaver and water vole consultant from Devon.”

Honestly, this was such flowing beatitudes and well-written prose that I honestly paused and thanked the lucky stars that England has been unreasonable as long as it has. Where else would we possibly get such persuasive and well crafted descriptions if it wasn’t for the stubborn bureaucrats who required endless persuasion? Take this section about coppicing for instance.

The homebody beavers are instead content to gnaw on willow trees from dusk until dawn, within the confines they have been allocated. By coppicing these trees, beavers promote new shoots to form on old trees.

It is an old relationship. Humans have been coppicing willow for 8,000 years in the UK, but beavers have been doing it for around 10 million years.

Not only does the willow get a new lease of life, but beavers benefit too. When placed within their dams, willow shoots continue to grow, creating a natural and self-reinforcing building material.

Ahh. Just imagine what the scarred earth would look like if beavers were allowed to work their magic in peace?

“Where water would travel 180m in tens of seconds at maximum velocities, now you’ve got a situation where that water’s taking hours if not days to move through this site,” says Brazier. “And it can only be attributed to these dams.”

Beavers dampen any hydrological extremes, reducing the peak flow of water and making it stay longer in the

area. In contrast, the drainage ditches that line the surrounding fields sweep rainfall downstream in a flash.

Flooding occurs. Water from headwaters accumulates quickly when the land levels off, not only breaking the banks of rivers but also the bank accounts of many homeowners. The infamous UK floods of 2007, for instance, caused an estimated £6 billion of damage.

Beaver can help, Brazier says. By slowing the flow – while storing 650,000 litres of water behind each dam – these mammals are a natural method of flood prevention, before the flood has even started. They can protect our homes, by building their own.

And by mastering the art of imperfect engineering, beavers also stem downstream droughts. The dams are not watertight. Water is slowed and stored, yes, but it is not stationary and made stagnant. “It’s so slow,” says Brazier, as he points out how each pond is a metre lower than the one before. “It’s like a big escalator staircase with water gently moving through.”

Are you imagining? I sure am. What if our dry California creeks were moistened by beavers and the flashy overflowing paths of the east coast storms were slowed by beaver dams. The country would be a different place entirely, and the wrath of climate change would be less drastic.

“The more you look at beavers, the more you understand the other species that exist in the habitats they create,” adds Gow. “Beavers are basically the generators of life.”

A beaver is not just an animal. It is an ecosystem.

Aaand SCENE!

In ten years of writing about beaver writing that is the single finest sentence I have ever read. Thank you, Mr. Riley for defining a movement with your pen. My clipping an snipping doesn’t come close to doing the piece justice so make sure you head over to read the original right now and send it to everyone you know because its THAT good.

And when its all finished go read it again because there are lovely uppercuts to the fishermen and references to the new Bridge Creek study as well. Mr. Riley did his homework, and we all get the benefit.