Do you all hear that whirring draining sucking sound all around us? It’s the noise of the tide finally turning. We knew it would happen. But mark July 25th in your calendars. It will all be easier after this. Remember that.
Millions of highly skilled environmental engineers stand ready to make our continent more resilient to climate change. They restore wetlands that absorb carbon, store water, filter pollution and clean and cool waters for salmon and trout. They are recognized around the world for helping to reduce wildfire risk. Scientists have valued their environmental services at close to $179,000 per square mile annually.
And they work for free.
Our ally in mitigating and adapting to climate change across the West could be a paddle-tailed rodent: the North American beaver.
Oh My GOODNESS! I’m so excited. I’m sitting in the front row so eager for the state of California to read this article I can’t see strait.
There’s a strong consensus among scientists and environmental managers on the benefits of working with beavers to protect our natural environments. Beavers can help us continue to live on, work with and enjoy our Western landscape. As ecosystem engineers, they build dams and dig canals to escape predators. Their manipulation of plants for food and building materials produces wide-ranging environmental gains.
Yet despite beavers’ ecosystem benefits, we have long pushed them out of their homes. When the European-American fur trade killed hundreds of millions of beavers, it destroyed the engine that built and maintained North American wetlands. California alone has lost an estimated 90% of its wetland area. Humans continue to tear down beavers’ dams and lodges when they get in our way.
Rather than chase beavers off, it is time to invite them back.
Watershed scientists and state and federal land managers can identify the thousands of streams most suited to beavers. Simple steps can help bring them to watersheds in need — whether that means helping restore river environments to attract dispersing juvenile beavers from existing nearby populations, or reintroducing beavers to locations where they had thrived before the fur trade and habitat degradation destroyed them as well as their homes.
I think it’s kind of odd to suggest we are just telling them to “move along, we don’t need your kind around here” instead of directly stating that we are in fact KILLING them and throwing their treasures down to toilet because it would require an ounce of effort to manage their behavior.
But that’s just me.
Beavers can then set in motion protective natural processes. Their dams and canals slow the flow of streams and rivers, spreading water across the floodplain. Once slowed, the water loses its ability to carry sand, silt and gravel, so these materials accumulate. The wet ground and regular sediment deposits make fertile conditions for vegetation that has evolved with beavers and is more productive when regularly chewed. All of this builds and maintains wetlands.
This nature-based restoration can in turn help stave off the worst effects of climate change that are warming streams, deepening droughts and fueling wildfires. These threats harm native fish and wildlife in our communities while draining billions of dollars from our economies.
Riverine wetlands rebuilt by beavers can counteract rising temperatures, nourishing vegetation that stores carbon and benefiting sensitive species including steelhead trout. Spreading water across the floodplain creates a network of firebreaks — gaps in combustible vegetation that can stop or slow wildfires. And beaver wetlands help combat drought because their dams raise water levels so the ground stores water like a sponge, percolating out in drier seasons, which keeps streams flowing instead of going dry.
As part of a team of state, federal and university researchers, we tested the capacity of beavers along an eastern Oregon creek so eroded from years of poor management that the water ran many feet below the surrounding terrain. The erosion led to dried-out floodplains, dead stream-side vegetation and a self-sustaining cycle of drying and degradation in the channel.
Well now this is definitely going to piss off the folks in San Diego that are sure beavers aren’t native and destructive to the endangered magic arroyo toad. I hope they have an extra cup of coffee this morning.
Fixing the creek would require slowing that water down, piling it up to reconnect the channel to its floodplain. This would be a big ask for beavers on their own, so we helped. We hand-built structures to mimic beaver dams to begin slowing and spreading the flow.
This work attracted the first beavers from other environments. In just a few years, more beavers found the spot and assumed the maintenance.Building on our initial efforts, they transformed logs, mud and sticks into structures that spanned the valley and spread the water across many small branching channels, canals and ponds. Willows and other stream-side vegetation emerged. Water soaked the ground in storage that gradually filtered back out, offsetting dry spells.
Stream-side communities might worry that letting a wild dam builder loose might spur flooding that could damage property. But beavers are creatures of habit, meaning we can predict which locations have the lowest potential for human conflicts and greatest potential for environmental benefits. We can entice beavers to remote areas such as millions of acres of national forest and other federal and state lands. And we have tools to prevent beavers’ work from damaging property, such as devices that keep beaver ponds at safe levels, fencing or paint to protect trees and screening to ensure drainage systems are not plugged.
The work is also relatively cheap. The main costs of beaver-based stream restoration involve helping them get a foothold by starting restoration work ourselves and, where necessary, transporting beavers to the right natural site. This approach typically costs thousands of dollars per mile, not the millions per mile we often spend on infrastructure solutions.
Well that will turn some heads. BDAs are like crack or meth to these folks. Your first hits free. They aren’t excited yet about the actual B’S but that will come. We hope.
This solution also requires not destroying our population of environmental heroes. Last year alone, approximately 25,000 beavers were killed by wildlife control officers in response to people’s complaints and requests to protect their property. Imagine the value to communities of promoting nonlethal options instead, such as adapting the environment for coexistence with beavers or, when that’s not an option, moving them to less conflict-prone locations.
The job is enormous, but so is the capacity of beavers to help. Modest funding for beaver restoration was added to California’s budget this year. Groups that protect wildlife, fisheries and wetlands should join forces across the West to make beavers integral to a coordinated climate change response.
That’s a weird statistic to share. Why not focus on beaver deaths in California specifically? We know how many permission slips were handed to kill beavers in the golden state. Why not report that number maybe even specifying how many in the bottom half of California?
Still. Still WONDERFUL to have an OpEd in the LA Times and wonderful to think of all the eyes it will be read by. At a certain point this is going to make sense to people. And we’re going to get to stop clearing the path with a machete through the back country.
Remember July 25th.
Oh and what a great day to share this video that Cheryl caught of our new beaver friends in Pleasant Hill. Which is suddenly looking a whole lot more pleasant to me.
CLIMATEWIRE | Behold the beaver: master engineer, wetland dweller and a national symbol of Canada.
Now add climate change specialist to the list, scientists say.
According to new research, beavers are among the world’s most effective practitioners of climate adaptation and resilience, something biologists have known for years but have recently documented through field study.
Experts from the Northwest Fisheries Science Center and the California State University Channel Islands say that as droughts and floods become more acute with global warming, dam-building beavers are helping stave off the worst impacts by holding back essential water that otherwise would run off or dry up.
“It may seem trite to say that beavers are a key part of a national climate action plan, but the reality is that they are a force of 15–40 million highly skilled environmental engineers. We cannot afford to work against them any longer; we need to work with them,” Chris E. Jordan and Emily Fairfax wrote in their paper titled “Beaver: The North American freshwater climate action plan.”
Whooo hoo hoo! I’m an American and I think that’s plenty scientific. The article continues:
The research, published in the journal WIREs Water, found that the kind of climate benefits provided by a species like the beaver — categorized as “low-tech process-based stream restoration” — are “rapidly gaining traction in the face of looming climate and biodiversity crises.”
“If you just put a beaver there and let it do its thing, the number of ecosystem services they provide to help with climate change, it’s huge,” Fairfax said in a phone interview last week.
“It’s also less expensive: Beavers are free.”
Yes they are. They’re born free and they have a right to live free. And not be dropped in parachutes over every scarred mistake this country has made. But that’s just me.
They are also abundant, which poses a unique challenge for the landscape-altering mammal both in North America and elsewhere.
For centuries, Eurocentric cultures valued beaver only for their pelts, and they were hunted to fractions of their natural populations across their traditional range, according to researchers.
As human settlement encroached upon streams and wetlands, beaver populations crashed again by as much as 90 percent, even as they continued to thrive in wild areas and pockets of protected habitat. Their dam-building ways also earned them a reputation as pests, especially to farmers.
Fairfax noted that while restoring public acceptance is a gradual process, wildlife managers have come to value the animals for their role in creating fire protection.
She characterized such natural adaptation measures as “low-hanging fruit” — meaning it requires virtually no effort on the part of those seeking fire protection. “Wildfires in California are getting out of control year after year, so people are saying, ‘You know, I’ll take the flooding if it means I won’t burn,” Fairfax said.
Good point. But of course people don’t have to “Take flooding”. They have to “Address flooding”. Just like they fix a flat tire on the way home from the feed mart. If you can fix a fence you can fix a flow device. We need to think of them more as investments in our landscape and less as curiosities. I’m dreaming of the day when insurance even reimburses you for properly installing one.
“I’m happy to see people going out of the traditional disaster mode and taking a chance on beavers,” she added.
In Oregon, the nonprofit organization Beaver Works has promoted beaver swamps as a critical habitat for other species such as deer, elk, fish and songbirds that also provides cool riparian environments during hot days. “Without these ponds and channels — without the beaver — wildlife habitat on high desert landscapes becomes increasingly scarce which accelerates with climate change,” the group states on its website.
California recently approved a specialized license plate program sought by Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom that should yield more than $1.6 million during the next fiscal year and $1.4 million annually thereafter for climate resilience through beaver habitat restoration. When introducing the proposal in May, Newsom characterized the beaver “an untapped, creative, climate-solving hero.”
I added this to the library two months ago but in all the festival madness we never talked about it directly. We should. This is major. From Emily Fairfax and Chris Jordan.
Rivers and streams, when fully connected to their floodplains, are naturally resilient systems that are increasingly part of the conversation on nature-based climate solutions. Reconnecting waterways to their floodplains improves water quality and quantity, supports biodiversity and sensitive species conservation, increases flood, drought and fire resiliency, and bolsters carbon sequestration. But, while the importance of river restoration is clear, beaver-based restoration—for example, strategic coexistence, relocation, and mimicry—remains an underutilized strategy despite ample data demonstrating its efficacy. Climate-driven disturbances are actively pushing streams into increasingly degraded states, and the window of opportunity for restoration will not stay open forever. Therefore, now is the perfect time to apply the science of beaver-based low-tech process-based stream restoration to support building climate resilience across the landscape. Not every stream will be a good candidate for beaver-based restoration, but we have the tools to know which ones are. Let us use them.
Don’t forget the useful tool of GETTING OUT OFF THEIR WAY and letting them decide things for us. People are always underestimating that tool as well.
It may seem trite to say that beavers are a key part of a national climate action plan, but the reality is that they are a force of 15–40 million (Naiman et al., 1988) highly skilled environmental engineers. We cannot afford to work against them any longer; we need to work with them. In most cases, the first step will be starting the physical restoration process before beavers move into a system—setting the stage for functioning floodplain processes (flow, space, structure; Beechie et al., 2010, Cluer & Thorne, 2014, Wheaton et al., 2019). Human intervention may be necessary to restore severely impacted floodplain processes to the point at which beavers and beaver mimicry can be applied (e.g., deeply incised channels, ongoing disruptive land-use practices). In other situations, our first step may be policy changes: for example, if floodplains are intact, but beaver management actions (e.g., the lethal removal of beavers that impact the built environment) prevent population persistence sufficient to further recover these landscapes. Regardless of our role in the conversation, beaver inspired or implemented process-based restoration should be a primary strategy to achieving healthy riverscapes (Macfarlane et al., 2015; Pollock et al., 2015). A stream where beavers thrive is a resilient, productive stream (Pollock et al., 2014). Flourishing beaver populations can be our partner in combating climate change and a bellwether of our progress.
4.5 Ecosystem services
Should we entrust a large rodent with such critical environmental engineering tasks? If restoring riverscapes is really such an important piece of our national climate action plan, should not we do it ourselves? Ultimately, the scale of changes that need to occur are beyond what we can accomplish and maintain on our own. However, beaver-based riverscape restoration has a high return on investment in both revenue and expense control (Baldwin, 2015; Blackfeet Nation, 2018; Blackfeet Nation & Levitus, 2019; Pollock et al., 2015; S. Thompson et al., 2021; Wheaton et al., 2019). Revenue generation typically results from increased tourism and outdoor recreation (e.g., hunting, fishing, hiking, camping, wildlife viewing), while expense reduction from lower expenditures in disaster mitigation, carbon management, water quality assurance, and water conservation. These ecosystem services by beaver, as well as many others not discussed in detail here, is estimated at $69,000 per square kilometer, per year (S. Thompson et al., 2021). Secondary economic benefits of utilizing beaver coexistence and beaver mimicry in riverscape restoration would help offset the already low cost of implementing beaver mimicry and managing human–beaver conflict (Boyles & Savitzky, 2009)
Beavers do it cheaper. Beavers do it Better. Get Outta their way.
5 CONCLUSION: WE NEED (NATURE’S) ENGINEERS
To return the full process-based functionality of connected floodplain systems we must acknowledge the critical role that biological components play—particularly beaver. When we remove beaver from streams and rivers, or prevent them from re-establishing in their ancestral watersheds, the stream-floodplain system falls into disrepair (Wohl, 2021b). Once they are disconnected from their floodplain, down-cut, incised streams simplify into single-threaded channels. Sediment and carbon are exported from long-term storage, water warms and becomes eutrophic, the landscape dries out and fires run for miles across a uniform expanse of fuel, all leaving little in the way of healthy habitat for fish and wildlife. But, beaver managed floodplains are biodiversity hotspots because beaver ponds and wetlands serve as sinks for carbon, processing centers for nitrogen and phosphorus, reservoirs for the storage and cooling of water, and mitigation sites for both drought and flooding. Thus, it is imperative that we foster beaver-dominated areas for the many services they provide.
We need to apply our knowledge of the physical and biological processes of functioning riverscapes and the role that beavers play to drive rapid, comprehensive, and durable action. Actions that address the pervasive degradation of North America’s streams, rivers, and floodplains. Actions that rebuild the natural, functioning dynamics of riverscapes to permit robust responses to disturbance. Riverscape restoration, and in particular process-led and beaver-based restoration, should be the foundation of our national freshwater climate action plan.
So yesterday the very best argument for beavers was dropped in video form from the Oregon Field Guide. They revisit Bridge Creek where they produced ground breaking footage of Michael Pollock discussing BDA’s to fight incision and increase salmon. It seemed encouraging at the time, but I guess it might have been a fluke that there were more baby fish after beaver dams came.
Now they have 10 years of data piled up. And there are 180% more juvenile salmon than there used to be. I would call that irrefutable. Do me a favor? Watch this video all the way through and share it with everyone you’ve ever met.
Yesterday was a helluvaday for beavers, with a high velocity shot across the bow for our California historic population paper. We are still formulating our response but just in case you wondered, we noticed. I usually post links to articles I talk about but I’ll just post Emily’s tweet in response because they don’t deserve one so you can google it if you’re interested,
