Tag: Emily Fairfax

FIRES AND FLOODS AND BEAVERS, OH MY!

Fires and floods are the punishing destructive forces of nature that even the bible recognizes. The answer to both might be staring us in the face. What if what we needed all along wasn’t an ark, but a some beavers?

The National Trust is preparing to release a small number of beavers into the south of England to help manage the landscape and combat flooding.

In a scheme to combat flooding, the National Trust is planning to release a small number of beavers in England. Initially, two pairs of beavers will be released into large woodland enclosures in Holnicote, Somerset, near tributaries to the River Aller. A third pair of beavers will be released into an enclosure at Valewood, on the edge of the South Downs, West Sussex.

Beavers, once native to Britain, were hunted to extinction in the 1500s, although small numbers have been observed in the wild in Scotland and Devon in recent years. Beavers are considered a ‘keystone’ species due to their work building dams in rivers, which significantly affects the landscape and ecosystem around them. Through dam building, beavers help restore precious wetlands through erosion reduction, downstream flood control and water cleansing. However, scientists have also raised concerns about the volumes of carbon being released into the atmosphere from soil as a result of beaver damming.

That’s right. Beavers to the rescue. Again. Although no solution is without its risks. Noah might deserve full disclosure.

“Beavers are nature’s engineers and can create remarkable wetland habitats that benefit a host of species, including water voles, wildfowl, craneflies, water beetles and dragonflies,” said David Elliot, National Trust lead ranger for Valewood. “These in turn help support breeding fish and insect-eating birds such as spotted flycatchers.”

Well said.

Yes they do. And if prevent flooding’s not enough, maybe you’ll be interested to know they can also reduce the risk of fire.

Don’t believe me? Ask a scientist.

Smokey the Beaver: Can Beaver Dams Help Protect Riparian Vegetation During Wildfire?

When beavers move onto a creek, they build dams that slow the flow of water and spread it out over the landscape. That stored water can help keep the entire landscape wet and lush, even when everywhere else is dry. People have seen beaver-dammed areas stay green through droughts before, and this past year photographs of green beaver wetlands surrounded by the char of wildfire showed up in the news media. Although we are seeing this happen, there weren’t any studies proving that places with beaver damming are burned less by wildfires than places without beaver damming. We looked at five different large wildfires that burned in places with beavers, and use satellite data of plant greenness to see whether or not the plants actually stayed green and healthy during the fires if they were near beaver dams. Our data confirms what people had already seen happening: places with beaver stay green even during wildfires, places without beavers do not. For a short (45-second) animation of this phenomenon,

Wow! December 11 in San Francisco. That would be our own heroine Emily Fairfax who wowed the world with her smart research and stop motion film last year. Emily started work as an assistant professor at Cal State Channel Islands and if she keeps this up I’m expecting great things for her and beavers.

Some say the world will end in fire,

Some say in ice.

From what I’ve tasted of desire

I hold with those who favor fire.

But if it had to perish twice,

I think I know enough of hate

To say that for destruction ice

Is also great

And would suffice.

Robert Frost

IT’S BEAVER EVE!

heidi08 Beaver Art, Beaver ecological impact June 28, 2019

Which did you like better as a child? Christmas Day or Christmas Eve?

Okay I realize if you’re Jewish that question is meaningless and kind of annoying, but in my mind that is a question represents whether you are the kind of person who loves anticipating, planning and imagining how things are going to be or the kind who loves to actually get them/taste them/use them and see how they turn out.

I’m definitely the former.

Last year,watching Amy begin her masterpiece on Friday was my favorite day. She was so creative, friendly and fun that I was total fan-girl on the benches. I remember I stayed long enough to need shade and Jon brought me a canopy so I could see more dynamic unfolding at work. It all makes me excited about today, and not nearly as nervous about tomorrow as I should be.

But how could you NOT love this simple starting place?

Or where it leads?

This is a different design and a different year. Last year she started at the top and did the landscape and wildlife first saving the beavers mostly for the festival. This year she’s doing the round mandala and there’s no way to draw the beaver last because pastels don’t appreciate being sat on. Less landscaping and more rewilding. Who knows how this will unfold?

I also found out yesterday that beaver heroine, maker of the amazing beaver-and-fire film and now-assistant professor at Cal State Channel Islands is FLYING IN specifically for the festival! Yesterday I sent her Rob Waltons fantastic article in the Oregonian and said she needed to write one for California. And guess what she replied? That she would be and that part of her thinking in coming to the festival is looking for collaborators.

To which of course I replied MEMEMEMEME!

She also said she’d be bringing one of my google VR headsets for virtually visiting beaver ponds if anyone wants to try it!!!!

Poor woman. I’m sure she has zero idea how popular she will be!

I just looked up that pond and saw that her CV is on line and mentions the pond being reported on the WORTH A DAM website. Good lord, I need to be careful of my horrific typos and slapdash humor. I always forget this website gets read.

Type like nobody else is watching my irish grandma would say! If in fact I had an Irish Grandma.

Here’s a friendly reminder of why we love Emily:

And if you need it, here’s a friendly reminder of why we love Amy.

‘TIS THE SEASON

heidi08 Beavers elsewhere, kits, What's killing beavers now? June 16, 2019

June of course is Kit time. Not when they’re born around here but when they’re usually seen for the first time. For 11 years I watched new kits fumble around the creek every summer, I suffer withdrawal pangs every day that I don’t get to see a beaver kit in 2019, but John Hutters in the Netherlands posted this photo on facebook yesterday that soothed my soul for a while.

It may well be the sweetest parent/kit shot I have ever seen, but I’m open to competition.

Look at that tail! Just look at it and tell ME that isn’t a social greeting! I adore this picture. John also has a sweet new film of mother and kit grooming but it isn’t on youtube yet so unshareable here. Something to look forward to, I promise.

Meanwhile our friend Emily Fairfax has started teaching at Cal State Channel Islands, where she is working on accessible ways to process data so that she can teach her students to be the most convincing scientists they can be, This meant she was excited about the beaver depredation spreadsheet we got from CDFW. And she tossed together this lovely interactive.

If you hover over a region it will tell you the name of the county and how many permits were issued. Pretty snazzy huh? Not quite the right parameters for this website but darn cool to see live. Just look at that dark slash across placer county which stands like an open wound killing the most beavers of any place in the state.
Still.
Sigh.

But onward. We must fight for better things. Even if the freekin’ city won’t hang our lampost banners and the printer isn’t printing our brochure yet. Never you mind. The show, as they say, will go on. Here’s the lovely brochure for your perusal anyway. Use the +/- to zoom in and view it closer.

Brochure For Printer

BEAVER SAMPLER

heidi08 Beaver ecological impact April 26, 2019

Back on my very own computer and my very own wifi, I may never stop talking at all this morning. Certainly there’s very good news on the beaver front. This week I found out that we received three of the four grant applications i made. The fourth we are still waiting on. The CCC board of supervisors met this week and decided to award our fish and wildlife grant for the treasure hunt at the festival, and the Martinez community foundation is once again funding our art project. Fingers crossed we will hear good news from the city soon which, adding the grant from Kiwanis, will bring us to a full three thousand for the festival and with proceeds from the silent auction should allow us to break even for the event.

There’s some scattered good news from other states as well, including this report from Colorado.

Boulder County, city of Boulder analyzing best streams for beaver restoration as ecological health boost

Researchers over the past two years have been looking for the best spots to potentially reintroduce beavers into streams on Boulder County and city of Boulder public open spaces.

The county and municipal open space programs spent $10,000 apiece to fund a study led by Colorado State University researchers Ellen Wohl and Julianne Scamardo to help identify stretches of streams most able to successfully host beaver, if one or a family were to be placed in the given area.

“We awarded (the funding) to them because of our interest in beaver restoration and ecological restoration using beaver,” Boulder County Parks and Open Space Biologist Mac Kobza said, noting habitat for other animals and whole riparian ecosystems can be enhanced by the ponds resulting from beaver damming.

“Where beaver go in they tend to increase the biodiversity. Native species benefit from that, from trout, to native insects that live in the water to other native species,” he said.

Not only is Boulder investing money in reintroducing beavers to study, they’re even considering city open space locations! Be still my heart! Dr. Wohl is a powerful beaver force that often gets overlooked in the summation of how we know beavers matter. Her research has made much of the conversation were having today.

Yet, water storage across this thirsty state could actually be improved by the beaver’s tree-felling and damming habits, authors of a Colorado Sierra Club report argue, citing studies suggesting as much.

“Potentially the easiest, cheapest way to accomplish this end is to allow nature to regenerate where practicable to its previous state with the mighty ecosystem engineer, the American beaver, breaking the trail,” the Sierra Club writers stated.

What an awesome start to a study. I can’t wait to read all about it. Apparently Julianne Scarmado has the oral defense of her dissertation on monday, I for one can’t wait to read all about it. Good luck!

Speaking of Colorado and great minds, guess who finished her Ph.D. from CSU Boulder landed an excellent job as Assistant Professor in Environmental Resource Management at California State Channel Islands! I guess her explanatory stop motion video was a big success because this is that state where she wanted to end up.

So of course Dr. Emily Fairfax celebrated in the usual way.

California is lucky to have you in our state, yet another brilliant beaver researcher added to our ranks, I eagerly await great things.

One final bit of wonder I’ve been saving to share with you comes from Helen McCaulley, the seasonal ecologist from Scotland who patiently filmed this classic moment watching the Tay beavers. Make sure you watch until the end so you can see the pond maker reminding the otter just whose neighborhood he’s in.

I SEE BEAVER PEOPLE

heidi08 Beavers, Beavers and Fire Prevention February 19, 2019

Guess who’s whose stop motion made it on the Verge?

‘Dam good’ video shows how beavers could fight fires

An adorable video that shows how beavers can fight wildfires is making the rounds on Twitter, and it’s everything science communication should be: short, compelling, clear, and about beavers.

The stop-motion video is the work of Emily Fairfax, a graduate student at the University of Colorado Boulder. It shows a beaver building a dam and transforming the forest upstream into a marshy wetland filled with splotches of vegetation in shades of green. When a fire rages through the forest, the ponds of water and healthy plants protect the area above the beaver dam from the flames. That includes the beaver, which holds up a little flag that says “I’m okay!”

So far, the video has more than ~~180,000~~ 292000 views on Twitter, and it’s getting the delighted reactions it deserves. Conservation experts, teachers, and beaver advocates have all asked Fairfax for her permission to share the video. Others want to know how she made it, and, as it turns out, it’s pretty low-tech: Fairfax set up a beaver dam in her kitchen, snapped photos on her iPhone, and used an app to turn them into a stop-motion video.

Ohhh it makes me so happy that Emily gets a fitting rollout for her efforts! Think of ALL those people delightfully forced to make the connection between beavers and fire prevention! Think of how powerful broadcast this is while you’re basically looking for a job, to do a little wonderful thing that makes headlines in a field your ground-breaking research pretty much invented!

The whole thing started because Fairfax is wrapping up her PhD and is studying the ways that beavers can help their habitat withstand hazards like fire and drought. Now that she’s applying to jobs, she’s spending a lot of time trying to explain her research, and she realized she kept reaching for a visual aid. “I’m trying to talk with my hands, and I want to pull up all these pictures on my phone,” she tells The Verge. So she made a video instead.

She set the scene on a cork board at her kitchen table with construction paper, rocks from her garden, and leftover fake plants from her wedding. She made the stream, beaver dam, pond, wetland, vegetation, and the fire out of felt. The beaver was the easy part. “I already had a bunch of little beaver toys because people give me beaver stuff for the holidays every year,” she says.

HAHAHAHAHA when Jon and I read that article aloud we laughed and laughed. Ohh little phd beaver girl just starting out, there’s such a decorated road ahead of you! I still resent a little Ben’s description of our home in the book Eager, but it’s a fair cop. See what your house looks after doing this work for a decade,

To my knowledge, the world’s largest collection of beaver-themed tchotchkes, knickknacks, and memorabilia is housed in an oak-shaded street in Martinez, California. To enter, you must pass beneath the mural that hangs over the front porch — a reddish beaver, stick grasped in forepaws, tail raised in salutation. The dim interior has the feel of a shrine. Beaver magnets cling to the refrigerator; plush beavers perch atop the bureaus; a gallery’s worth of beaver paintings, prints, and posters stare down from every wall. Gnawed stumps rest next to the fireplace. Embroidered beaver napkins hang in the kitchen. In the backyard, a clay beaver crouches in the birdbath. If I’d come during Christmas, I would have seen a cardboard beaver cut-out, roughly the size of a black bear, strung with lights on the front lawn.

Ben Goldfarb, Eager: The surprising secret lives of beavers and why they Matter.

Don’t feel bad, Emily. You’re off to an AWESOME start! I just know that someday soon National Geographic will describe you too as “Colorful”!

It took her a few tries to snap about 300 photos on her phone, which she stitched together with the Stop Motion Pro app. Then she added sound effects in iMovie — including a banjo soundtrack. The music is a nod to documentaries about beavers, Fairfax told The Verge. “There’s always banjo music playing when they’re building, and I don’t know why,” she says. “I can’t break tradition!”

She tweeted the video on Sunday, not expecting it to have much reach beyond what Fairfax calls her “beaver people” — a small community of people interested in beaver science. She went on a hike, and when she came back, the tweet had blown up. “I’m getting comments from K-12 educators, I’m getting comments from land managers,” she says. “Ultimately that’s the goal of something like this, to make people interested who wouldn’t otherwise read my papers, or come to my conference presentations.”

I love being called “beaver people”. In fact I love it with a fiery passion. Thank you Emily for naming the fantastic club I worked so hard to join.

Fairfax thinks part of the video’s appeal is its brevity. “Scientists have great tendency to ramble on — myself included — when we’re talking about things we really like,” she says. This video, by contrast, is less than a minute long. And the best part is that it doesn’t use any of the jargon that can make science so impenetrable because it doesn’t have any words.

Ahh what a sweet way to graduate into beaver life. Emily I an SO happy for you and all the exciting beaver places you’re going to go and all the exciting beaver people you’re going to meet and inspire. In the meantime I’m going to believe that that some cousin or college roomate of some kind of lower aid to Gavin Newsome is going to see this and the conversation about California’s monster fire season is being helped by beavers is going to come up!

Maybe as soon as tomorrow. What a perfect way to start beaver conference week. Even though we can’t be there we get to celebrate your wonderful addition to the conversation. Congratulations Emily!