Oh goody. There’s money for research into all that dam climate change that beavers are causing. I pretty much knew there would be.

Anglia Ruskin University gets £0.5m for Arctic beaver study

The changing habitats and behaviour of beavers as they move further north into the Arctic Circle will be examined in a new study.

Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge has been granted £553,491 to investigate the mammals’ impact as they move northwards.

Researchers want to understand their effects on the landscape, fish populations and indigenous people. Project leader Dr Helen Wheeler said she was “delighted” to receive the sum.

The study will look at the effects of climate change and rising temperatures. The line where trees grow has moved northwards, as has the beaver, which builds dams and water pools by felling trees.

A cool half million to study how beavers are wrecking the countryside by hastening it’s demise. Remember Helen was the one who thought their dams might be ruining things for salmon too and destroying the native economy.

The funding, from the government-sponsored UK Research and Innovation body, will build on studies being carried out by the university in Canada’s Northwest Territories looking at how beavers are changing local ecosystems.

Researchers will examine how beavers’ dam-building can change landscapes by creating ponds and diverting rivers, leading to fewer fish that local people rely upon.

The number of beavers heading north of the treeline and into the Arctic, together with the amount of new ponds they are creating, have caused permafrost to melt.

This can lead to greenhouse gases methane and carbon dioxide being released.

Ohh hoo hooo. To be a researcher piling onto this little trope gathering! Because cause climate change! Not Shell Oil! Give me funding!

The new study starts this month and will last for three years, looking at an area in Canada’s Inuvialuit Settlement Region. UK researchers will work alongside Wilfrid Laurier University of Canada and the Inuvialuit Fisheries Joint Management Committee.

Dr Wheeler said her team would bring together experts from a multitude of fields.

“We will be able to investigate the complex effects of rapid environmental change in a truly interdisciplinary way,” she said.

“What is especially pleasing is that this project is working closely with Inuvialuit partners and community members, and together we will be creating tools and infrastructure that will exist way beyond the life of the project.

“This will allow locally led monitoring and research to continue in the region long term… to help inform their ongoing stewardship of the land.”

We will be teaching them how to BLAME BEAVERS and TRAP BEAVERS so that it will last for generations! Aren’t you a little curious where that money comes from? Raise your hand if you answered ‘Chevron’.

She should feel so proud.

Beavers have been moving into the Arctic, accelerating the effects of climate change

NPR’s Sacha Pfeiffer speaks with Helen Wheeler, a wildlife ecologist from Anglia Ruskin University in the U.K., on the impacts beavers are having as they move into the Arctic tundra.

For years now, scientists have been documenting the somewhat mysterious spread of a new species into the Arctic, beavers. They’re sometimes called nature’s engineers for the way they change the shape of streams and rivers and ponds. Those changes can accelerate the effects of climate change, since the warmth of the ponds the beavers create with their dams can thaw the frozen ground below. They may also be affecting the environment in other ways. Helen Wheeler is a wildlife ecologist at Anglia Ruskin University in the U.K. She’s researching the impact of beavers on indigenous communities and local ecosystems in Canada. She joins us from Cambridge, England. Hi and welcome. (more…)