It’s fairly good to be me at the moment, and being you got a whole lot better this week. I heard encouraging things from the web designer for the California beaver Summit yesterday, and had great fun watching this dynamic presentation from the good folks at the Scotts Valley Watershed Council. You really should make time for this epic story. They did and continue to do an unbelievable amount of work.
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Aren’t they wonderful? They get all kinds of folk marching to their particular beat. I’m so impressed. They’ve made a significant difference not only for beavers but for the river, the groundwater, the fish, the birds and the climate!
And there’s more good news on the climate change front coming. You just wait,
Wildlife: A Crucial Piece of the Puzzle in the Fight Against Climate Change
Wildlife and the diversity of species within an ecosystem increases an ecosystem’s ability to store carbon, making wildlife’s role in the fight against climate change indispensable. Levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are balanced by the natural movement of carbon through certain ecosystems, during which CO2 is absorbed by plants, sediments or the surface of the ocean. From there, it is stored for long periods of time. The top five ecosystems for storing carbon per unit of area are tundra, seagrass, mangrove forests, salt marshes and forests. In the United States, temperate and boreal forests absorb enough carbon to decrease national annual net emissions by 11%. But without wildlife, ecosystems cannot operate at the maximum level to fight climate change.
Beavers, another keystone species often thought of as an ecosystem engineer for their roles creating habitat through dam building, help and hurt in the fight against climate change. The organic material in their dams store carbon and the dams. The organic material in their dams store carbon and the dams filter out pollution and reduce floods and the spread of wildfires. Climate change is causing more precipitation to fall as rain rather than snow, leading to more flooding and less water availability downstream in the summer. The presence of beaver dams at higher elevations can slow down this type of water flow and avert early runoff, much like snow does.
Of course any article about climate change and beavers can’t finish without at least a mention of the horrors beavers are creating in the tundra, making habitat for all those displaced species that are driver out of lower elevations by fire and drought. Sure. Okay. But believe you me, if you the planet is going to be ravaged by climate change, you are better off having plenty of beavers around to help.
