Tag: Emily Fairfax

WHAT DOES CALIFORNIA HATE MORE…BEAVERS OR FIRES?

heidi08 Beavers February 23, 2023

I remember when this first broke through, when Emily Fairfax was still looking for the right job post graduate-school. I am so glad to see it is still making a dramatic impact today. But honestly that was a long time ago. It feels like we are in slow motion. CDFW still hasn’t really shifted their thinking about beavers, they have just slowly signaled that they someday eventually possibly might.

We need more beavers. Yesterday.

How Beavers Help Fight Wildfires

What might beavers have to do with wildfire mitigation? Quite a lot, as it turns out. I talked about it with Dr. Emily Fairfax, an environmental scientist at California State University-Channel Islands who studies (among other things) how beaver dams impact the landscape around them. Here’s part of our conversation, edited for brevity.

Tell me, what do beavers have to do with wildfires?

Beavers are ecosystem engineers that can rapidly transform simple streams in thriving wetland ecosystems. In doing so, they also massively increase the surface water storage and soil water storage of landscapes.

During wet periods, the earth around beaver ponds fills up with water like a great big sponge. Then during dry periods, the plants that live near beaver ponds can access the stored water in that earthen sponge and stay green and healthy, even if the droughts are long and intense. Because the vegetation around beaver ponds is buffered against drought stress, it is relatively inflammable.

When a wildfire starts, that fire will take the path of least resistance and rapidly burn through dry vegetation. The beaver wetlands and the vegetation within them are quite wet, so fire either skirts around them or stalls, and sometimes blows over them. As a result, beaver complexes stay green while the rest of the landscape burns.

It seems like this research is pretty highly relevant to California’s success as a state survivor of climate change. Almost like any one who keeps beavers on their property is doing his neighbors a favor, the entire state a favor. Maybe we should be incentivizing stewardship, eh?

What does your research around beavers and wildfires show?

My research shows that rivers and creeks that have beaver dams burn three times less than similar rivers and creeks without beaver dams.

I’ve also looked to see whether this effect persists in megafires (which are increasingly common as climate changes), and in one study I found that 89% of beaver dammed areas served as fire refugia – meaning they didn’t burn, or only had very low intensity burning. Only 60% of riverscapes without beavers were fire refugia, and only 37% of the nearby hillslopes and non-riverine environment were fire refugia. So this beaver-driven fire resistance is a really durable effect – beaver complexes are uniquely and remarkably hard to burn.

It’s almost like beavers are giving us guard rails to keep us from driving over the edge but we just keep right on killing them and plunging to our deaths anyway. Does that sound smart to you?

Me either.

How might understanding what beavers do help us understand how to better control or survive wildfires?

Climate change is a really big, really complicated challenge we’re facing. There is so much work to do, and honestly it sometimes feels like too much work to do on our own. The fire refugia that beavers create has very real value as fire moves through the landscape. Not only can plants and animals stay safe in these beaver-engineered landscape patches during fast-moving blazes, but the physically complex wetlands also help catch and settle out debris and ash that is being carried in the rivers post-fire.

Further, understanding how beavers engineer their wetlands to be so fire resistant can help inform our own fire management strategies in river corridors. We don’t have to solve all the challenges of climate change on our own – working with nature and ecosystem engineers like beavers can be really powerful.

Gee it’s almost like beavers are so important people should throw them a festival of some kind every year, Invite hundreds of people and teach everyone who comes just how much they matter.

Just sayin’.

BEAVERS IN THE LANDSCAPE NEED YOU!

Raining cats and dogs? Raining goats and elephants more likely. Yesterday was a deluge in every way possible with exciting thunder to boot. Martinez has been relatively lucky compared to some. And all that water overfilling our reservoirs and rushing down rivers to the ocean makes drills in the point again and again: We need more beavers!

Yesterday’s heart breaking story of the little boy washed away in San Miguel creek in San Luis Obispo county made me remember the sad heroism of our own beaver dams, who stopped the floating body of an old man who had died and slipped into the creek, washing down stream lost to his home and family. I wish there were more beaver dams to help that poor little one who was on his way to school in Paso Robles or at least to bring comfort to his family by letting know where he ended up.

Maybe Martinez and San Luis Obispo have more in common than we think. Because this great upcoming event of the Santa Barbara Perma Culture Network bore an unexpected drop of our name. I only hope things settle enough for it to happen, because yesterday lots of the city was told to shelter in place or prepare to evacuate due to truly unbelievable 6 inches of rainfall on top of already wet soil.

Beavers On the Landscape

Saturday, January 21, 2023 – 18:30 to 20:30

Santa Barbara Permaculture Network

Dr. Emily Fairfax & Cooper Lienhart
Saturday, January 21, 2023
6:30 – 8:30pm FREE

Santa Barbara Community Arts Center
631 Garden St, Santa Barbara CA 93101

Beaver dams are gaining popularity as a low-tech, low-cost strategy to build climate resiliency at the landscape scale. Emily Fairfax

Join Santa Barbara Permaculture Network for an evening with Dr. Emily Fairfax, PhD and Cooper Lienhart as they share their work & passion for beaver, a keystone species that until very recently was vastly underrated as the ecosystem restoration hero it is.

With extended droughts and catastrophic fires plaguing California and the West, in recent years Dr. Fairfax began focusing her research on the impact of beaver on wildfires. Where beaver and their dams and pond complexes are allowed to flourish, water tables naturally rise, and keep the surrounding vegetation and soils hydrated. Dr. Fairfax’s observations on the positive aspects beavers have in controlling wildfires with the wetlands they create, prompted her to coin the phrase “Smokey the Beaver.

Well this seems like a good time to focus on their benefits to FLOODING because it’s going to be foremost on everyone’s mind for a while.

As a part of the evening, Cooper Lienheart, a recent environmental engineering grad of Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, will share how as a student he became interested in beaver. Like many young people Lienhart became increasingly concerned about climate change, and learned about wetlands and their ability to act as carbon sinks sequestering carbon, and the role of beaver in creating these wetlands.

Of course beavers and human settlements are often at odds. But in communities like Martinez, CA, where a popular Beaver Festival takes place every year, they have demonstrated these conflicts can be managed with clever strategies, good for the beaver and the community. And with these kind of beaver management strategies come new jobs, especially good for the next generation, many who yearn for positive livelihoods.

Let that be our legacy. We were a testcase for beaver management in the west. And we excelled at our job thanks to Skip Lisle and every one in town who made it a MAJOR news story. To tell a really new story to an unbelieving audience you need to be wildly compelling and shout it from the roof tops over and over.

Dr. Emily Fairfax is an Assistant Professor of Environmental Science and Resource Management at California State University Channel Islands. Dr. Fairfax double majored in Chemistry and Physics as an undergraduate at Carleton College, later earning a PhD in Geological Sciences from the University of Colorado Boulder. She uses a combination of remote sensing and field work to research how beaver activity can create drought and fire resistant patches in the landscape under a changing climate.

Go tell it on the mountain! We will all be there in spirit!

COMPUTERS LOOKING FOR BEAVERS

heidi08 Attitudes towards beavers, Beaver ecological impact, Beavers and Fire Prevention January 5, 2023

Alright. We’ve sufficiently mocked the beaver wildfire article and now we can get down to the good stuff. Just so you know in the background our tech-wizard Bruce Mushrush is busily migrating the beaver summit site to ours so that we won’t have to pay for both. If things are busy or weird for a moment just come back in a few minutes and all will be well. Because there are GOOD THINGS TO DISCUSS!!!

Scientists EEAGER-ly Track Beavers Across Western United States

Beavers are among the world’s most effective engineers. Members of this keystone species build dams and canals and, in so doing, create entire, multilayered wetland ecosystems. Beginning in the 1600s, however, the fur trade decimated North American beaver populations.

The species began rebounding in the early 20th century but sometimes came into conflict with the agricultural landscape, as by the 1940s and 1950s, people were aggressively modifying streams to maximize yield. Returning to their former haunts meant persecution as beavers flooded crops and felled orchards, explained Alexa Whipple, program director for the Methow Beaver Project (part of a nonprofit called the Methow Salmon Recovery Foundation).

Now, humans are starting to recognize that beavers, though still considered pests by some, benefit landscapes in myriad ways. For instance, beaver activity can reduce erosion, create habitat for other species, and maintain wetlands.

I’m liking where this is going. Surely we are going to enjoy todays read more than hitting the ecosystem over the head with a hammer.

In fact, we often want beavers to move back into landscapes to do the engineering for us, said Emily Fairfax, an assistant professor at California State University, Channel Islands. “But how are we going to know if they are doing that,” she asked, “if we don’t even know where they are?” The answer lies in remote sensing imagery, which can help scientists identify the landscape-scale features created by beaver families.

Through a combination of fieldwork and remote sensing, Fairfax tracks where beavers reside across the western United States. To make the process more efficient, she’s working with Google Earth Engine to develop the Earth Engine Automated Geospatial Element Recognition model—aptly called EEAGER—which uses machine learning to rapidly identify beaver dams in satellite and aerial imagery.

In work presented at AGU’s Fall Meeting 2022, Fairfax found that EEAGER decreased the time needed to map beaver dams by about 80%. By rapidly finding beaver ponds and comparing their changing distribution over time, scientists like Fairfax can track beaver populations to quantify the effects of their environmental engineering.

This years ago I got a call from an environmentalist working on the google sustainability team and he mentioned the tech giant was interested in adapting their “space laser technology” to id beaver habitat from space. And I was very impressed but daunted as to how it would work or where to offer such a skill. It is wonderful to see it find a home with Dr. Fairfax and the AGU.

The amount of existing and incoming imagery isn’t an impediment for sky-based beaver surveillance. Beaver dams remain in place for 5 to 7 years on average, said Fairfax; very high resolution data that are publicly available come out at least every couple of years and sometimes more often when fires and droughts strike (which is becoming more common). Lower-resolution data sets can provide helpful imagery about once per week, filling in any gaps.

However, tracing beaver dams in such imagery is incredibly time-consuming, often taking weeks to months. With large quantities of imagery, which Fairfax noted is a pleasant problem to have, the process can become a nightmarish sea of external hard drives holding terabytes of data.

Fairfax and her colleagues at Google who specialize in neural networks, machine learning, and artificial intelligence trained the EEAGER model with 8,000 of Fairfax’s manually identified beaver dams and another 5,000 from other coauthors. Because the model was convinced that cul-de-sacs were also beaver dams, they had to train the model on “not dams” as well.

All those little engineers being watched over by all those other little engineers! It’s fun to imagine, isn’t it? My nephew works for google. Do you think he’s part of the team?

EEAGER can now sort through massive amounts of satellite and aerial imagery and identify pixels that contain evidence of beaver activity. With Google Earth Engine, the data querying and processing happen in the cloud, Fairfax explained, so she doesn’t need to add more hard drives to her already impressive stash.

Fairfax noted that the model wouldn’t work as well as it does without extensive field mapping of beaver dams (and not beaver dams), which involves wading through muck and dense vegetation. But although pond-specific beaver studies are important, looking at how beavers affect entire watersheds can now be efficiently accomplished in beaver-based research.

For regions still needing ground truthing, drones now expedite this process. However, because Fairfax’s research has been focused on the western United States, EEAGER may be biased. “We actually don’t know how good it would do in places like Canada or Minnesota,” she said, “because it hasn’t been trained there.”

Computers trained to be on the lookout for beavers! Now if only we could train HUMANS to be on the lookout for beavers in the sense of welcoming them when they arrive.

After the results from EEAGER go through quality control, calculations can address whatever the science question at hand may be. For instance, in research currently under review, Fairfax looked at whether beaver dams became fire refuges during three Rocky Mountain megafires in 2020. In some watersheds, beavers had dammed every single stream from start to end, she said. These sinuous stretches of hydrologic connectivity resulted in fire-resistant habitats. “In these beaver complexes, everything stays wet,” said Fairfax, which means fires cannot easily burn these ponds.

“I’ve gone to [wildfire] sites where I fully expected the beavers to be dead,” she recalled, but “the evening rolls around and the beavers come swimming out.”

Channel modifications, such as straightening bends to transport logs and barges, result in water being whisked rapidly downstream, said Chris Jordan, a research fisheries biologist with NOAA’s National Marine Fisheries Service who was not involved with the study. Beavers’ networks of dams, canals, and felled trees do the opposite, slowing water down, which—like magic (except that it’s physics)—restores river systems, he said.

Given time and opportunity, beavers will engineer an entire valley floor, which could be more than a kilometer wide, said Fairfax. That seemingly magical engineering lets water seep into the soil, allowing streams to reconnect to their floodplains. Simple or degraded ecosystems can transform into riverscapes with healthy food chains.

You know how they do, hitting the ecosystem over the head with a hammer and all. Looks like Emily can tell the difference between a beaver effect and a wildfire.Maybe she should sit down with Ken Tape.

For example, because endangered salmon and similar fish species are born and die in fresh water, they depend on healthy river conditions to complete their life cycle, Jordan said. Growing more fish requires ants, earthworms, and other floodplain-dwelling invertebrates to become fish fodder. But for that part of the food chain to exist, landscapes around rivers need to be wet at least some of the time. Beavers create the necessary wetland environments that then become biodiversity hot spots.

Regular snapshots of beaver ponds from space, combined with algorithms doing the tedious work of examining millions of kilometers of streams, means new ways to quantify the impact beavers are having on the landscape, Jordan said.

Yes. You just keep algorithm-ing away and beavers will keep beavering away and maybe some day humans will finally understand why they should appreciate them.

I for one can hardly wait.

CALIFORNIA’S CLIMATE WARRIORS

heidi08 Attitudes towards beavers, Beavers and climate change December 13, 2022

So this weekend I got to glimpses into actual developments on the funding for beaver restoration in California. The first came when I heard a friend of this website and beavers in general is sitting for his second interview tomorrow for CDFW’s new Beaver Restoration Program. And I thought WHOA it’s really happening.

Then I got a early scan of the article friend Lisa Owen’s Viani wrote for Landscape Arcitecture about the project overall and I realized that the beaver world as we know it was really changing.

New Funding will create dedicated staff to support colonies of California’s Climate warrior Herbivores

When governor Gavin Newsom released his budget in June it contained a small but mighty line item: 1.67 million for fiscal year 2022-2023 to support a new beaver restoration program. The program which will receive 1.44 million the following fiscal year will fund five new permanent positions in the California Department of Fish and Wildlife for monitoring and restoring beavers as well as equipment for tagging and relocating beavers and monitoring their health.

So there it is, In black and white. Really happening and maybe an actual friend of this website and beavers themselves will get one of those jobs. Lisa does a good job with the article talking to all the usual suspects but this quote made me pause;

[Emily] Fairfax who has studied beavers and wildfire resilience says there are plenty of areas, especially in Northern California and the Sierra Nevada Mountains where fire risk is extremely high and watersheds and streams are severally degraded. It is in areas like these that beavers can really help…

As long as care is taken to carefully relocate beavers from areas like the Sacramento-San Joaquin river delta, where they have been known to cause conflicts for landowners, these ecosystem engineers can thrive with only a bit of habitat.

Which of course got my attention. Because those could have been OUR beavers. And more than this, what happens to a beaver in the delta, whose never lived through a winter freeze and knows nothing of keeping a food cache when it is suddenly transported to the snowy sierras? Obviously there’s no time for a learning curve when you are trapped in your lodge frozen and starving. Our beavers never kept a food cache. What would have happened to them if they were moved to a stream where it suddenly froze solid?

This makes me want to start lots of conversations among folks who might know. Obviously there’s an instinctive part of cacheing food – but I think it might get triggered by a social message from another beaver whose doing it too. Like a kind of fixed action pattern. If it didn’t beavers in temperate climates like Napa and Sonoma would do it too, right?

Let’s not use our shiny new beaver dollars to move delta beavers into the snow so they can starve to death, okay?

The state’s proposal is poised for success, Fairfax says, “It’s not just about relocation or coexistence, it’s the whole beaver package, meeting with people, doing outreach, hiring staff, doing it right. This is the time we have a spotlight on us as a state for beaver work.”

Well I like that part a LOT! Just don’t move all our delta beavers please. We like them.

BEAVERS HAVE A ‘SLAPPING GOOD TIME’ ON THE WEATHER CHANNEL

heidi08 Beaver Behavior, Beavers, Beavers and climate change October 15, 2022

More climatey beaver goodness with this interview of Emily Fairfax from the Weather Channel. She is well spoken as usual and beavers come off looking great but I cannot say the same for the program hosts who appear to have untreatable traumatic brain injuries causing incoherent speech patterns. I can only assume from some kind of weather-related incident in the past.

You know, like Dorothy suffered in the Wizard of Oz.

Listen closely because the woman on the right implies that beavers are known for aggressively slapping people with their tails”. I guess in all those years I spent by the pond I was lucky to be spared.